


Light the Fire Yourself

by Tayijo



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: BAMF Stiles, Canon-Typical Violence, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, M/M, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Minor Character Death, Stiles-centric, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-01
Updated: 2013-04-01
Packaged: 2017-12-07 05:00:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 30,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/744527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tayijo/pseuds/Tayijo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This particular dream, while it sucks, doesn’t really stand out. It wouldn’t even be a proper nightmare, what with the lack of blood and all, except he gets the same shivery horror from it, wakes up with his heart racing and sweat sprouting on his skin, and afterward he can't fall back asleep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Light the Fire Yourself

**Author's Note:**

> This is set in the same universe as my previous stories, ‘We Shall See Visions’ and ‘Jellyfish,’ several months later. It can be read alone but there’s some background in those other stories that might be handy to know.
> 
> I should probably warn for unhealthy sexual relationships and wanton use/abuse of comma splices.

The summer after the alpha pack is taken care of, after the May when they kill Peter again, is swelteringly hot and blissfully uneventful. Except for the one terrifying week when the thing that used to be Gerard Argent resurfaces and the pack scrambles to hunt him down and turn him over to Deaton and his superiors on the Council, not a single person in all of Beacon Hills is even torn to pieces. Other than that, summer is full of lazy afternoons in Lydia’s pool, Danny kicking everyone’s asses at Halo and Starcraft, pack movie nights in Derek’s new apartment ruled by Lydia and her rom-coms, and slow lazy days by himself where all Stiles does is sleep in, jerk off, and mess around on the internet. Some nights he even sleeps without dreaming.

Once school starts again, though, the nightmares come back with a vengeance. There haven’t been any warnings of anything coming, not like the alpha pack with their cryptic graffiti announcing themselves weeks before they showed up, but Stiles is certain that there’s no way there is nothing out there coming down on them. It’s like his subconscious is convinced that he’ll never be truly safe again: maybe the summer was different, peaceful, but it can’t last. Sooner or later something is coming for them. 

So he dreams of the tickling of spring rain down the back of his shirt, the crack of ceiling beams falling in, the press of the blindfold on his eyeballs while claws he can’t see cut the clothes off his body, and blood, blood, always blood. It takes his body a couple of weeks to adjust to only getting a few hours of sleep a night again, and even when he’s not such a zombie, walking the halls of the high school makes the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He carries mountain ash with him everywhere he goes, and ignores the sad face Scott makes when he smells the wolfsbane oil on the hunting knife in his backpack. Danger is coming and Stiles is going to be ready for it.

Three weeks into the semester, the nightmares change. It would be a relief, to know that the disaster is in motion and he can stop waiting, suffocating under the tension of not knowing when the axe is going to fall, but he‘s so used to night terrors by now that this particular dream, while it’s new, and it sucks, doesn’t really stand out. He dreams a man he doesn’t know, flat and still on a concrete slab, slowly turning to ice. It wouldn’t even be a proper nightmare, what with the lack of blood and all, except he gets the same shivery horror from it, wakes up with his heart racing and sweat sprouting on his skin, and the guy’s face-- he’d look like a soccer dad if he wasn’t dying-- sticks in his mind after and keeps him from falling back asleep. Stiles does what he usually does and gets on the internet until the sun comes up, and by the time he’s in school he’s not even thinking about the dream at all.

His schedule this semester isn’t bad. Scott’s in his first two classes, so they can sit in the back and pass notes to each other, and then he has AP Physics with Lydia and Rachel, who may not be as sharp as Lydia-- and really, who is-- but who can definitely hold her own. With them to study with, he’s going to knock that class out of the park. The pack sits together at lunch, of course, and while Stiles is sort of used to it now, used to having more people than just Scott, he’s not so used to it that he doesn’t feel a spark of happiness whenever Isaac slides in so close to him that their shoulders bump together. Besides, it’s really nice not to be left to eat alone when Scott ducks out of the lunchroom to call Allison, who doesn’t eat with them because she got her GED over the summer and works full time now at Argent Weapons Sales and Distribution, which used to be her dad’s cover job and is now just hers. So school isn’t so bad, and even if he is expecting something deadly to jump out at him, at least the pack is pretty cohesive, so whenever the next disaster happens he’ll probably have a werewolf or two around to get his back. 

Today, before Scott has a chance to stuff his food down his face and leave to call Allison, Boyd slides into the seat at the head of their table and announces, “We’re going to a show this Friday.”

“We are, are we?” Lydia has her girly face on, which means she’s hiding something, probably resentment at being bossed around. 

“Well.” Boyd picks up on it too. “My cousin’s band has a show, and I thought we could go support them. Fill out the audience, you know.”

“Where is it?” Scott sounds like he’s actually paying attention for once. He‘s probably envisioning getting Allison alone in a dark corner and having his way with her. Ugh.

“Um, its at a bar over in Riverbend, so like twenty minutes away. You all have IDs, right?”

Stiles slumps against the table. His shitty fake ID was confiscated by one of his father’s deputies way back when they were still trying to figure out how to stop the kanima without killing Jackson, and what with all the near-death experiences he was having at the time he’d completely forgotten to get a new one. “Nah, my dad took mine,” he says. “One of the perils of being the Sheriff’s kid.”

He isn’t expecting Danny to clap him on the back, but he does, and says, “Don’t worry, Stilinski. I got you.”

 

 

The bar is a complete dive, and Stiles knows that even though Lydia and Allison dressed him in an “actually kind of cute” dark red henley and skinny jeans he still sticks out like a baby-faced thumb in the assortment of post- college hipsters and grimy old drunks filling up the smoky bar. The first band isn’t really the kind of music that you dance to, it’s more indie folk rock than dance pop, but people are trying anyway, and the dance floor is crowded enough that no one can do more than bob up and down and smoosh against each other so it kind of works out. Boyd treats everyone to a round as thanks for coming out to support his cousin, and then Lydia orders a mixed drink, turns her nose up at it after one sip, and hands it off to Stiles, so he drinks it, and by the time Scott comes back to the booth they’ve staked out with the necks of a couple of beers in his hand and shoves one at Stiles, he’s almost buzzed.

Turns out the beer is a pre-emptive apology for ditching him, because in like two minutes Scott has disappeared without a word, which is irritating because everyone knows he and Allison are hooking up again, he doesn‘t need to act like it’s a huge secret. So Stiles drinks it, and watches the crowd, and by the time he finishes his beer he realizes that he’s the only one still in the booth, all of his friends have wandered away and the only one he can even see anymore is Rachel, out on the dance floor, all dark skin and smooth muscle. There are only two possible responses to that, either sit there and sulk, or wander out into the crowd himself. Stiles can feel a weird feral mood coming on and he’s not sure which option would make him feel better, isn’t even sure he wants to feel better. But before he’s decided which he wants to do, a man is coming up to him and smiling, and shouting over the music, “Hey, you want to dance?”

He’s definitely older than Stiles, possibly by a lot. Like a decade. But he’s slim, clean shaven, on the cute side of average looking, and he’s holding out his hand and hoping Stiles will take it, so Stiles does. The middle of the dance floor, which is really just the center part of the bar with the pool tables pushed to the side for the night, is about four yards away from the stage, and it’s even louder there, way too loud to talk. The guy tries, a couple times, he says his name, which Stiles doesn’t quite catch, asks Stiles if he’s there with anyone. 

“Just some friends who ditched me,” Stiles says, almost shouting in the guy’s ear.

“Their loss is my gain,” the guy says and grins at him. 

Stiles isn’t sure he’s having fun, isn’t sure he even wants to be here-- his brain is jumping around, thinking about anything but dancing: the book on true names he was reading earlier, his Physics homework, what’s his dad’s work schedule this weekend, can he remember the name of that song Isaac was humming earlier- and maybe that’s just his ADHD, or maybe he’s drunk, but maybe he should feel a little guiltier for dancing with this guy he’s only half into. But then the guy leans forward again to shout in Stiles’ ear, and this time he puts his hand on Stiles’ hip and presses his thumb to the front of Stiles’ hipbone, and he says, “You’re really sexy.”

Stiles doesn’t know what to say to that, realizes he’s said very little to this guy who is a complete stranger to him, which is unlike him, but it’s so loud, and with the mood he’s in he’s pretty sure attempting to flirt isn’t going to work out, so he just puts his hands where he can fit them: on the guy’s shoulder, on his side. He leans into the guy’s neck, like he’s going to say something, but he still doesn’t have anything to say, so he just breathes in the smell of him, sweat and hair gel and some kind of cologne that smells kind of like cloves. He likes the smell, it’s honest and masculine and it gets under his skin, turns him on, and he wonders for a second if this is what it’s like to be a werewolf, for smells to have that kind of power over you. Without thinking about it, he puts his mouth on this guy’s neck, lets his teeth rest there like he’s thinking about biting him. He really is drunk, fuck.

The guy-- what did he say his name was? Keith? Kevin?-- doesn’t seem to mind, says something that Stiles only registers as a hum against his lips, and then he’s got Stiles’ hand and he’s leading him off the dance floor. Stiles’ balance isn’t great, but the guy’s hand anchors him, and he lets himself be led down a short but dark hallway and through a door into --what turns out to be the men’s room. Awesome. But then Keith-or-maybe-Kevin is leaning into him and kissing him, and Stiles’ hand has found its way to the guy’s jaw and is holding him in place so he can kiss back. He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing but it’s nice, it’s nice to have someone’s hands on him and another person’s body pressed up against him from knee to groin to chest to face, and Stiles almost loses his balance and so does the guy he’s kissing, and they’re stumbling back so that Stiles is pushing him against the dirty bathroom wall and that’s even nicer. 

Keith breaks away from the kiss with this little gasp, says, “Fuck. Your mouth, so fucking sexy--” which Stiles knows is exaggeration at best because he’s not exactly the world’s most experienced kisser. He’s made out with two people before this and one of them was Isaac in an experiment to see if Isaac was bi, but then Keith is tugging at his elbow, just hard enough to register that he wants Stiles to move a little, in a downward direction maybe, and _Oh_. Dude wants a blowjob. Stiles hesitates, thinks about it for like a second and a half with his palm on Keith’s ass and Keith’s mouth on his neck right under his ear, and yeah. Yeah. He‘s drunk, and horny, and this isn’t exactly what he planned to do this evening but what the hell.

The bathroom tile is cold and hard under his knees, but he doesn’t really pay attention because Keith is unbuttoning his fly and shoving down his briefs and then he’s got his cock out and it’s right in front of Stiles’ face, all rosy skin and glistening tip. Keith is looking down at him and he must like what he sees because he makes this little “mm” of satisfaction and presses his cock to Stiles’ cheek. 

“God, you’re pretty on your knees,” the guy says, which is cheesy as hell, and also kind of insulting if he lets himself think about it, but somehow it still goes right to Stiles’ dick, makes it twitch with interest. And then Stiles’ hand is on the base of the guy’s cock and he’s opening his mouth, licking his lips and then licking across the head and fuck he’s really doing this.

Stiles has seen probably about the same amount of porn as any other 17 year old guy with an often empty house and reliable internet access, which is to say a lot, and a fair amount of that porn, whether it featured women or men, has involved sucking cock, so he’s nervous about doing this for the first time but not nervous enough to stop. He’s got a pretty good idea of what it involves, and Keith is drunk so it’s not like he’s a terribly critical audience, and anyway Stiles has done scarier things, so. It’s not quite like he expected, though. The taste, for one thing, is not something that comes through well in porn, or the satisfying heavy weight filling up his mouth, or the way he has to actively try to keep breathing through his nose so he doesn’t choke-- because while the idea of choking on a cock sounds fucking hot in his head, when he slides down too far and actually chokes it just makes him feel like he’s going to die. 

So he has to focus on what he’s doing, try to get a rhythm going while keeping his teeth out of the way, pay attention to Keith’s responses and not the graffiti on the wall at waist level-- eye level-- but he likes it. Likes the way Keith’s eyes keep opening and closing, like he wants to look at Stiles but as soon as he does it’s too much to handle and he has to hide. Likes the feeling of power he gets when he swirls his tongue and Keith says, “Yeah yeah like that yeah.” Likes Keith’s hand caressing the back of his head, like he wishes Stiles’ hair was long enough to pull. 

He likes it enough that his own cock is hard, pressing against the fly of his jeans, and he kind of wishes he could do something about it. Jacking himself off while giving his first blowjob is maybe a little too ambitious, though, so he ignores it in favor of speeding up a little, adding a little more pressure, letting the spit get pulled out of his mouth on each stroke so that he’s getting the guy’s cock all messy and wet. And that apparently works for Keith, because his hand flexes on the curve of Stiles’ skull and he says, “Oh” like it’s been punched out of him, and then he’s coming in Stiles’ mouth without warning, which is a little rude, right? But Stiles can’t bring himself to mind, because it’s also fucking hot, and it makes him feel like he did a good job, like if life was a video game he‘d be getting an achievement award with a little ‘ding‘ and flashing lights: Successful First Blowjob! The taste, again, is not what he expected, bitter and harsh, but it’s not that bad. It fills his mouth, and he swallows automatically, because that’s a thing, right, that people like. People like that, and where was he going to spit it out, anyway, the floor? That seems grosser than swallowing, somehow. 

Keith kind of strokes the back of his head for a second, and then pulls him to his feet, and for the first time Stiles is actually nervous because he has no idea what to do now. Fortunately Keith seems to have a handle on it, because Stiles doesn’t have to use any initiative, just lean against Keith’s shoulder and hold on when he unzips Stiles’ jeans and gets his hand around Stiles’ cock. It’s OK from that point, it’s a hand job so it’s not like it could ever be all that awful, he thinks, and while Keith doesn’t have the experience with Stiles’ dick that Stiles does, there’s something about the taste of come in his mouth and gasping against another warm, muscular body that just fucking does it for Stiles, and drunken clumsiness aside he can feel all of it, everything, to the tips of his fingers and toes, and it’s not long before the sensation washes over him like a wave and he’s coming all over Keith’s hand and Keith’s shirt.

If it was up to him, Stiles is pretty sure it would be awkward all over again, but Keith just licks his fingers and grins at him, then grabs a paper towel and dabs at his shirt. Before either of them can say anything, someone bangs on the restroom door and Keith calls out, “Just a minute.” There’s a doorstop holding the door closed. Stiles doesn’t remember that happening, but Keith must’ve put it there, and a good thing too because this, yeah, this is a public bathroom. Stiles blushes and re-arranges his clothes, even though whoever’s waiting on the other side of the door is totally going to know what they were doing in here when the two of them leave together. Keith-slash-Kevin winks at him, gives them both a once over to check that they‘re presentable, and then kicks the doorstop out of the way.

When they get out from under the glare of the burly bearded dude waiting for the bathroom and back out into the bar, Stiles catches sight of Scott and Allison and Lydia and Isaac sitting back in their booth, and he takes a step toward them before hesitating. He barely said two sentences to the guy he just lost his virginity with, and he feels weird about that if nothing else, like maybe he should say “Thank you,” or “I had a good time, I hope you did too,” but when he looks to the side where Keith was walking behind him, he’s gone, and that’s that. He stops by the bar and buys himself a Jack and Coke, because what he just did was fun and easy and he’d rather get drunk than process his feelings about it just yet, and meanders his way over to the booth. 

He sits down on the end next to Lydia, because Scott and Isaac would probably smell the sex on him and while Isaac would give him a high five if he knew, Scott would probably scold him, and he wants to avoid that for as long as possible. Lydia gives him the side eye like even without werewolf sense she knows exactly what he just did, and he’s blushing hard enough to be really grateful that this bar is so dark, but then Boyd’s cousin’s band is finished setting up for their set and music spills back out into the crowded bar, and he’s saved from awkward conversation.

 

They all end up at Derek’s house the next afternoon. The wolves have training and Stiles tags along with one of the books he privately thinks of as Dusty Old Tomes that he bought at the magic shop in Sacramento before school started. This particular book is all theory, and it’s dry as hell, but Stiles wants to know more about ley lines and location-dependent magic, so he’s working his way through it. He’s in the middle of a chapter he doesn’t really understand, something about magically significant events and how they can leave traces of power in a place for years afterward, and idly wondering if the Hale house might actually be a location like that, seeing as eleven people died here-- no, Kate Argent makes twelve-- no, thirteen if you count Peter even though he was killed outside, and you probably should count him since he also came back to life here-- when Scott flops down on the couch on the porch next to him, all sweaty and dirty from Boyd dumping him on the ground.

“Are you OK?” Scott asks, which surprises Stiles a little. He didn’t think he was giving off Not OK vibes. 

“Yeah, what’s up?” he asks absently. Maybe it takes more deaths than that, though-- or maybe there’s something about how those deaths happened that mean there’s no echo left here, because he‘s pretty sure there isn‘t one. The book says something about _alignment_ and _concurrence_ and _occasion_ that he’s not really getting, but he knows it’s important. It’s why he’s reading this crap, after all. 

“It’s just-- last night,” Scott says, and, here it comes, the conversation about how Stiles is a slutty disappointment, and he just really doesn’t want to hear it. 

“What about last night?” he says, cold and closed off, hoping Scott will get the hint even though he knows he won’t. 

“Who was that guy you were with?” Scott asks, all careful, like Stiles is a bomb full of emotions ready to go off. 

“I don’t know his name,” Stiles says, trying hard for cool. He’s embarrassed about that, a little, even if he isn’t trying to make what happened into something it’s not he still wishes he knew the guy’s _name_. But Scott doesn’t need to know he has any regrets at all, it’ll only feed his concern. 

“I-- you don’t?” Scott looks baffled now, and pained, like he thinks Stiles has been hurt or something. 

“No, I don’t. Look, Scott,” Stiles throws his hands out. “It wasn’t anything, OK? It’s not a big deal.”

“You mean--” Scott still looks baffled. “You mean you didn’t have sex with him? Cause it pretty much smelled like you did.”

“I mean it’s not a big deal. I’m old enough to kill a man, I think I’m old enough for a drunken hookup if I feel like it.” Stiles didn’t mean to sound quite so melodramatically dysfunctional, but whatever, it’s too late now. And it’s true, anyway. He’s not a kid anymore.

“It’s just, I thought you hadn’t-- I mean, that wasn’t your first-- was it?” Scott is so fucking infuriating sometimes, mostly because it’s impossible to stay angry with those sad puppy eyes. 

“If I say no, will you believe me when I say I’m fine?” he tries, but Scott’s eyes just look sadder, so he says, “Yeah, OK, it was. But I swear I’m really OK. It was fun, it wasn’t a big deal. Not everybody gets an epic fucking romance like you and Allison, you know. So, just. Drop it, OK?”

Scott still looks worried about him, but he does drop it, starts critiquing Isaac and Boyd’s sparring match instead, and Stiles lets the tension leak out of him, bit by bit. Eventually it’s Scott’s turn to spar again, and Stiles drops his attention back to his book, and it’s almost twenty minutes later when he gets a creeping feeling and looks up to see Derek sitting on the porch steps, watching him. Which, shit. Stiles can’t identify the storm of emotion swirling in his stomach, but it’s at least partially embarrassment, probably, since his cheeks are flushing. 

“You were paying attention to that conversation, weren’t you?” he asks unnecessarily. Of course he fucking was, what is Stiles’ life.

Derek doesn’t bother answering, just keeps looking at him with that expression that Stiles knows most people see as angry or threatening. He’s gotten better at reading Derek, though, and so he’s gotten enough experience to know that that face just means Derek is hiding something he doesn‘t know how to deal with. What he’s hiding, Stiles doesn’t know. Maybe he’s just hiding from having an embarrassing talk with a teenaged pack member, he tells himself. Maybe. 

“Look, like I was telling Scott, it’s not a big deal, I’m fine, nobody needs to worry or give me a lecture or anything.” He lets himself be annoyed so he doesn’t have to deal with anything else he may or may not be feeling. 

Derek sighs. “Be careful,” he says.

Yeah, annoyed is definitely the way to go. Stiles flings his hands out in sarcastic emphasis. “Got it, Pops, you don’t need to give me the safe sex talk. I know all about condoms.”

Derek makes this little frustrated gesture. “That’s not what I meant. I mean.” And he stops, like Stiles should just _know_ what he means without him saying it. “I just mean, you should do the things that actually make you happy. And if something doesn’t make you happy, you shouldn’t do it.”

“I- OK.” That wasn’t what he was expecting, and as far as “So you’re having sex now” talks go, it’s a lot more like something a friend would tell him than he would have ever expected from Derek Hale. “OK,” he says again, not sure what else to say. 

“And if anyone…” Derek makes a face like he’s bitten into a lemon, like he can’t believe he’s about to say this. “If anyone ever hassles you or anything, you come tell me.”

“You mean because I’m not straight,” Stiles says slowly.

Derek shrugs. “Or anything.”

Stiles is starting to suspect that he’s missing something here, but he’s just really fucking glad Derek isn’t disgusted by him, so he goes with it. “Sure, OK. Thanks.”

His alpha duties seem to be discharged, but Derek still looks troubled. He just echoes Stiles, though, says, “OK,” and pushes himself up off the steps.

 

 

Stiles has the nightmare again that night. He can‘t move in the dream, and the man laying in front of him, arms at his sides, can’t seem to move either. Nothing at all is moving and it stretches on and on. Stiles can’t look anywhere except at the man’s face as it gets paler and bluer and frost grows on his eyebrows and Stiles can’t do anything to stop it and then he wakes up, panting.

After that, what he comes to think of as _the frozen nightmare_ becomes a staple of his dreams. He can’t do anything about it, any more than he could about any of the other nightmares, so he resigns himself to it, grits his teeth and tries to pretend like he gets more than three or four hours of good sleep a night. He started running a couple of miles every other day back in April, right after they dealt with the alpha pack, but now he starts running every morning when the dream wakes him up before sunrise, and his runs get longer, but while the exercise helps wake him up in the mornings it doesn’t make him sleep any sounder at night. He dreams the frozen nightmare every night for a month, and then one day it just stops, and he sleeps through the night.

It’s November, and the weather is terrible, but Stiles thinks two whole months into the school year with zero murders is a grand fucking accomplishment, and since he got like seven hours of sleep last night without a single dream that he remembers he’s in a sassy mood when he stops by the sheriff’s station with dinner. He drops a plastic takeout container of pho from the Vietnamese restaurant that just opened down the street from the high school on his dad’s desk and sits down with his own bowl of soup.

“It’s perfect for a rainy day, dad, and it even has beef in it. Don’t say I never did anything for ya.”

His dad grunts in response, glares irritatedly at Stiles when he sees the chopsticks on top of his container of pho, and asks, “Seriously, Stiles? I’m supposed to eat soup with sticks?”

Stiles laughs, delighted that even with everything he’s seen and done he can still manage to tease his dad, and produces a spoon from his back pocket. His dad seems happy about the teasing too, or at least happy to have a spoon, and they settle into a comfortable dinner conversation, which means Stiles is doing like 75% of the talking. He’s in the middle of a play-by-play description of the experiment they did in Physics that morning when his eyes wander over the corkboard behind his father’s desk and he gets caught on the picture tacked right in the middle. It’s the man from his dream-- like, the photo looks like it was taken at a party, maybe on someone’s cell phone, the guy has his head turned to the side and he’s talking-- or maybe laughing-- mouth half open, margarita in his hand. His hair is a little shorter, he’s clean shaven, he’s wearing different clothes, but he’s absolutely the guy from Stiles’ nightmare, and now instead of laughing at a party he’s up on the wall of a police station, which means--

“Stiles, what is it?” His dad’s question breaks into Stiles’ racing thoughts, and he realizes that he’s been staring with his mouth open, spoon suspended in the air, whatever he was saying before completely, utterly lost.

“Who is that?” he asks, hoping the horror in his voice will convince his dad to give him some piece of information he can work with beside the guy‘s face.

“It’s an open investigation. I can’t discuss it.” There’s something in his dad’s tone, it might even be anger, and Stiles thinks about all the hours he’s put in since his dad got his job back last year rebuilding the trust his dad used to have in him. He doesn’t want to go back to that place where his dad thought he was some kind of delinquent fuckup, so he should drop it. Now that he knows there’s something to figure out, he can research it without involving his dad. Google is his bitch, it’ll be fine. 

“Why?” his dad asks, and Stiles really hopes that isn’t suspicion in his voice, but he knows that if it is, he deserves it. Maybe it’s that thought that has him answering almost truthfully. 

“I, um, I think I’ve seen him somewhere before.”

“You have?” his dad perks up, and while his professional instincts are kicking in, he doesn’t seem to be aiming them directly at Stiles, which is a relief. “Can you tell me where, or when? We, uh, we might be trying to pin down his last known location.”

Stiles shakes his head, because he’s actually pretty sure he’s only ever seen this man in his head, in his nightmares, and _holy shit_ he’s about ready to start freaking out about that, and maybe he’s paying more attention to the idea of having _prophetic fucking dreams_ than he is to his dad, and that’s why he says, “I had a dream about him.”

Shit. Stiles’ brain explodes with ways to explain that comment away, ways that have nothing to do with magic or werewolves or anything uncanny. His mouth is moving faster than his conscious mind, but his dad interrupts his stream of “--I mean, my memory has a very imprecise and dream-like quality about it, and isn’t déjà vu a weird feeling? but I probably just saw him on the street or something, I’m sure it’s nothing--” with “Stiles. It’s fine. If you remember anything specific, you let me know, OK?”

Stiles nods, shuts up, and eats his soup in quiet for about five minutes, letting the panic ebb. Once he’s feeling less flustered, he asks, totally casually. “So that guy who’s missing, what’s his name?”

And if his dad scowls because Stiles isn’t even supposed to know that the case he’s working is a missing person, he still answers, and that little tidbit of trust in him makes Stiles happier even than getting the information does. 

  
_Andrew Wright_. Stiles tucks the name away, and when he excuses himself to “go do homework” twenty minutes later, he and his dad both pretend that he’s not scrambling off to Google the guy. It’s not the smoothest he’s ever been, but it’s normal, familiar, and his dad isn’t looking at him like he’s a disappointment, which is nice. It’s almost like old times to have his dad irritated with his curiosity but putting up with him, and at least he doesn’t know why Stiles is so interested in this particular case. 

Stiles doesn’t really know what’s going on either, and he doesn’t know how to explain about his nightmares without explaining about everything, from Scott getting bitten to his own hands covered in blood. Stiles doesn’t want to ever have to explain to his dad that magic is real, because that would mean explaining that his only son is a killer, and he doesn’t think-- he couldn’t handle that. Which means Stiles can never explain this to his dad, because while he doesn’t know Wright, doesn’t know why the guy was in his head, he can’t shake the sick certainty that whatever it was that got him up on the police station wall, Stiles was supposed to save him. And he didn’t. 

 

 

The rest of the evening is a blur. Stiles stays up until 5 am reading anything he can get his hands on that’s even tangentially related to significant dreams, and the next morning he finds himself in first period English copying _Scott_ ’s homework, of all people, just so he’ll have something to turn in that he doesn’t have to think about. He hasn’t done the reading, can’t make time for _Flowers for Algernon_ when he needs to know everything he can find out about creepy dreams. 

He’s only been studying magic for, like, five months, and Deaton is honestly not that great a teacher- he’s cryptic and unhelpful and often just plain not around, and even if he does let Stiles read any book off his bookshelf, and sometimes even recommends specific books on a topic, half the time when Stiles has a question he just tells him to figure it out on his own. So the whole learning-to-be-Harry-Potter thing has been kind of slow going. 

There’s a list, on his laptop, of things he wants to know about, to know how to do or if they’re real or whatever, but, before this, nothing to do with dreams was very high up there. Other topics seemed a lot more relevant to his own precious personal safety, like knowing everything there was to know about werewolves, or protection wards and barriers to keep out the dangerous creepy crawlies. Even if he did occasionally remember that disturbing feeling he got off of Matt before anyone knew he was controlling Jackson and wonder if that was connected to his spark of magic, that wasn’t really a proper premonition. It was more like being a good judge of character, which, hey, you didn’t need to be magic to be able to do that. Learning how to protect himself and his pack was much higher on Stiles’ list than anything about creepy nightmares that connected you to strangers who might or might not be in danger of the possibly-but-not-confirmed-to-be supernatural kind. 

So he doesn’t know anything, at all, about where to start with this. He doesn’t even know what it is that’s going on with him. Were the dreams the result of some kind of freaky psychic connection he has with Wright? Or maybe with whatever-- _ate him up_ , he doesn’t think-- made him disappear? That would be just Stiles’ luck, his brain being connected to some kind of monster in a way that is completely useless for anything but scaring the shit out of him when he tries to sleep. Or maybe the dreams really were prophetic, or premonitory, or whatever the right word is for seeing the future. They did stop the day _before_ Wright disappeared, after all.

Whatever it is, none of the books he’s picked up so far cover this shit, and everything on the internet to do with dreams of any kind is buried so far under lucid dreaming how-tos and New Age dream interpretation bullshit that it’s completely useless. The Argent bestiary, which he flips through on his laptop during his free period in the library, does have a few listings of things that could cause dreams, but none of them sound like what Stiles is experiencing. The most detailed dream-related bestiary listing is for succubi, and the illustrations that accompany it are disturbing enough to make Stiles hope he never has a sexy dream ever again, but it doesn‘t tell him anything useful. 

Magical information resources exhausted, Stiles skips last period and drives home to come at the problem from another angle: the life of Andrew Wright. It isn’t as hard as he was expecting, even without access to his dad‘s files. The Beacon Herald has a short article about Wright’s disappearance, complete with a plea from his family to return him and the number for the police hotline, and there’s a website, apparently set up by his family to spread the word to anyone who might have seen him and collect anonymous tips. The website has some basic info on the guy: he was in his mid thirties, worked as a pediatric nurse at Hillview Urgent Care Clinic, had two kids, girls, ages 4 and 7. There are photos of Wright with his kids at the beach, bright plastic shovels and wind-tousled baby hair in front of a sand castle. He looks happy. Stiles makes himself go over every bit of information, looking for hints that might explain why this guy in particular is the missing person case that ended up in his nightmares for weeks, but there’s nothing. 

Wright’s Facebook page is open to the public, and has more photos. It takes him a while to put it together, but then he’s browsing Wright’s photo album of art-- he was an amateur painter of mediocre skill, and Stiles is thinking of him in the past tense because even without proof of death he knows Wright isn’t coming back-- and he notices a complicated Celtic knot worked into the border of a painting. It’s a protection symbol, a minor ward against evil, and the caption on the picture says, “Housewarming present for Judy and Mike. I love you, sis.”

Maybe it’s a coincidence. The symbol is pretty and he’s seen it in art before, used without knowledge or intent, but now that he’s looking, he can see that it isn’t the only bit of magic Wright put in his paintings. There are blessings and wards and a snippet of text that he can’t read but that looks like it might be Irish Gaelic. Wright’s profile says he’s an atheist-- not Wiccan, not pagan, not ‘spiritual but not religious’-- so it would be a little weird if he was using these symbols as religious motifs.

Stiles clicks back to the missing person website, looks Andrew Wright in the face. _Hello there, Mr. Witch. What did you get mixed up in?_  


Then he grabs his cell phone and calls Deaton.

Deaton doesn’t pick up, so Stiles calls the animal clinic. There’s no one there to answer the phone, Stiles realizes when he gets the recorded message, because he’s been staring at his computer screen for a lot longer than he thought and it’s almost 10pm on a Tuesday, so instead of leaving a message, he calls Scott. 

“I need to talk to Deaton, but he isn’t answering his phone,” is what he opens with.

Scott grumbles for a minute about his bad phone etiquette, which you’d think he’d be used to by now, then says, “Deaton’s out of town for a few days, at a vet conference or something?” He sounds unsure. “Anyway the clinic is closed until Friday, so I don’t have to work.” Which means he’ll be at Allison’s house instead, judging by the cheerfulness in his voice and his inability to focus on the crisis Stiles is having. 

“Well, I need to talk to him. Can you call him?” Stiles asks.

“Why can’t you call him?” Scott whines, and Stiles wishes he could reach through the cellular ether and smack him.

“I did. He didn’t pick up, but maybe he’ll think it’s some kind of animal emergency if you call.”

“Fine,” Scott huffs out, and he sounds so put out that Stiles wonders if he’s actually with Allison right this second.

“Great!” he says, trying not to let the sarcasm be too biting. “Text me if you get a hold of him.”

He messes around for a few minutes until Scott texts back _No luck_ , and then another couple of minutes before he convinces himself he’s exhausted all his other options. Ever since that night at the bar, or more specifically the conversation Derek overheard the afternoon after, he’s felt a little on edge around Derek, and not just because whenever he jerks off to the memory of that night he has to exert himself to keep his mind from substituting Derek’s hands for Keith’s on the back of his head, on his cock. There have definitely been more than a couple of times that Stiles has caught Derek looking at him with this really intense expression, like Stiles is a puzzle to be figured out, and it makes Stiles feel naked in a much less pleasant way, and makes him wonder if Derek was maybe more disgusted by Stiles‘ behavior than he let on. So he’s been avoiding Derek, sort of, or at least not seeking him out for one-on-one interaction. Which is their normal state of affairs anyway, so it’s not like he’s being weird about it. 

Derek might know something, though, if a witch has been killed in Beacon Hills, and if there’s some kind of supernatural mischief going down he’s going to want to be in the middle of it, so the sooner Stiles calls him the better. 

Derek answers his phone on the second ring. “Stiles.” 

“Derek, hey, how’s it going?” _Smooth, Stiles, A+_ , he thinks. 

“What do you want.” Stiles knows Derek isn’t as hateful as he sounds on the phone, so he tries not to take it personally. 

“Well, my dad has this case that he’s working, a missing person, and I think there’s a strong possibility that it might be, uh, our kind of thing. Well, not wolves I don’t think, there’s no evidence of werewolf activity at all actually, but the guy who’s missing, Andrew Wright, I think he might be a witch. I don’t suppose you’ve, like, heard anything? Or, I dunno, smelled anything weird around town?”

“What did you say his name was?” is all Derek says. 

“Andrew Wright.”

“I don’t know him.” Which was not what Stiles asked, but OK. “Have you talked to Deaton?”

“He’s out of town or something, I don’t know.”

“Is there something weird about this case? What makes you think he’s not just a normal missing person?”

“Well,” Stiles says, aware that he’s dancing around the real issue, “He, uh, has a lot of witchy art on his Facebook page? Like, real stuff, wards and blessings and stuff that he put into paintings and gave to his family.”

“So, he’s a witch. Still. Maybe he got sick of his job and took off for Vegas.” Derek sounds unimpressed, and a little irritated that Stiles called him up to chat about a stranger’s Facebook profile.

“And there’s also the dream I had about him,” Stiles says, feeling weirdly guilty and helpless about the whole thing. “Dreams, plural, I guess, or singular, I don’t know-- it was always the same dream. But I had it for weeks, and it was always the same thing, just this guy and I could see his face and he was freezing to death, like past the point of death, until he was all blue and crystalline and covered in frost, and I couldn’t do anything. And I just thought, you know, what’s one more nightmare? But then I was at my dad’s office and I saw his picture. He’s a real person, Derek, who I was dreaming about and now he’s probably dead and I didn’t save him.”

Stiles is expecting Derek to be a little pissed at the news that he’s been having weird dreams for weeks without telling anyone about them, so he’s completely flabbergasted when Derek says, “It’s not your fault. Whatever happened.”

Stiles’ heart kind of stutters at that, at his fears just laid bare so matter-of-factly, but he doesn’t want to break down, so he kind of snorts and says, “Yeah, no, I think it is. But the important thing is I think I need to know what happened, so if you hear anything on the werewolfy grapevine, would you let me know?”

“Of course,” Derek says, still serious and soft, and Stiles doesn’t know what to do with that so he stutters out a “Thanks,” and hangs up.

It’s too late by then for anything but internet research, and the internet has already yielded up its treasures, so Stiles resigns himself to actually doing his math homework before he goes to bed. He has plans for more research the next day, maybe even going to talk to Wright’s family in person if he can figure out a way to not be creepy about it, but he’s derailed at breakfast when his dad comes up behind him as he pours milk onto his cereal at the kitchen counter, snags a banana from on top of the fridge, and heads for the door. As far as he knows, his dad isn’t working until this afternoon, so Stiles tries to stop him. 

“Hey, dad, what’s the rush?”

His dad doesn’t stop walking, just shoots over his shoulder, “Nothing’s wrong, Stiles, go to school.”

Which Stiles does, because even if there’s a crime scene it’s already swarming with cops and he won’t be able to get anywhere near anything helpful, and by the time he’s in study hall at 1 pm there’s a brief article on the Beacon Herald’s website: Andrew Wright’s body was found in the woods. He went hiking alone, got lost, and died of exposure. Someone called in a tip, and the coroner confirmed his identity this morning.

He waits until school is out to call Derek. 

“That was you, wasn’t it?” is what he says instead of ‘hello,’ because it’s not like Derek wants to waste time being polite.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Derek says, voice flat, but Stiles isn’t buying it.

“The anonymous tip. They found Andrew Wright’s body in the woods.”

Derek sighs. “Yeah. He was too far off the path for anyone else to find him any time soon.”

“So, what did he really die of?” Stiles wants to know, and he doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t really need any more vivid  images of death floating around his brain, but he has to know what happened.

“As far as I can tell, exposure,” Derek says. He sounds frustrated. “I’m not a crime scene tech, but it didn’t seem like there was anything uncanny about it.” 

“Maybe that’s all it was, then,” Stiles says, even though _accidental death while hiking_ doesn’t really add up with _month of prophetic dreams_. 

“Maybe.” Derek doesn’t sound like he believes it either.

“Well… I’ll keep you updated if I find out anything else,” Stiles says, because he doesn’t know what else to say.

Derek just grunts. 

“Oh, and Derek.” Stiles doesn’t know why it’s important to say this, but it is. “Thanks.”

“No problem,” Derek says, and hangs up.

 

 

Stiles knows better than to bother a grieving family the day they find out their family member is dead, so he stays home. There’s something that doesn’t add up, but he doesn’t know what. It’s just a feeling itching in his skull. He would get Scott to come over and play video games with him to distract his mind and let his subconscious work its magic, but Scott is spending the evening at Allison’s, sleeping over if he can get away with it-- which means, if his mom is working the night shift, and Stiles would be jealous of how much sex Scott’s been having if he’s not really glad he only has to deal with all the drama that comes along with it second-hand. So he texts Isaac instead, sets up a private game on Battle.net, and plays old Warcraft III maps with him until after midnight. 

He doesn’t have any flashes of brilliance, and when he finally goes to sleep he has the familiar bloody nightmares he’s been having for what feels like forever. He kills his dad over and over, in a brand new gruesome way each time, until he can’t take it anymore and gets out of bed at 4:30 and slips on his sneakers. 

Running and three cups of coffee make him feel almost human again by the time school starts. He finds Scott by his locker before first period and grabs him by the elbow. “Hey, I need you to try calling Deaton again.”

Scott eyes him, like he’s finally noticing there’s something going on, and says, “Sure, I’ll call him at lunch. What’s up? I mean, I thought you just had a question for him about your magic stuff, but you kind of look like crap.”

Stiles shrugs, because he doesn’t want to blow Scott off but he’s too tired to explain right now. “I’ll tell you when we’re not at school.”

Now Scott knows there’s definitely something going on, but he accepts the postponement, and then Stiles sees Lydia and manages to change the subject to how she should really let him copy her Physics homework. 

Scott sticks to him after the last bell instead of heading to see Allison, which Stiles guesses he should be grateful for, and he plays Stiles the voicemail Deaton left him during fifth period: “Scott, my business out of town is taking longer than expected. My colleague Dr. Gonzalez will be covering for me at the clinic while I‘m gone, starting Friday. Show her around, and I’ll be back in a couple weeks.”

The combination of Deaton’s unplanned-for absence and Stiles’ cryptic questions has Scott genuinely worried, so Stiles can’t stall any longer, and he ends up spilling the whole story at Scott’s house over the noises of a Marvel v Capcom duel. Scott tells him not to worry about it, that whatever happened is clearly over and Deaton will help him figure it out later, and it actually makes him feel a little bit better even if he hates not knowing what’s going on. Kicking Scott’s ass at video games makes him nostalgic for the way things used to be, back when it was just the two of them, and it‘s a good kind of nostalgia, the kind that wraps around you like a warm blanket. 

Things do get back to normal. Stiles doesn’t give up on poking around Andrew Wright’s death, although he stops short of bothering the Wright family. He does manage to steal ten minutes with the official incident report when he finds it on one of his dad’s deputy’s desks, and he and Scott and Isaac go out to the spot in the woods where the body was found, but Scott and Isaac don’t smell anything noteworthy at the cleaned crime scene. Stiles wasn’t really expecting them to, not once the sheriff’s department walked all over it, but he’s still kind of at loose ends. There doesn’t seem to be anything more to investigate, and he’s no closer to finding out what’s going on with his brain, which freaks him out when he lets himself think about it. He doesn’t like the thought that something ugly invaded his dreams without his permission, but he doesn’t have the frozen nightmare again, so he resigns himself to waiting for Deaton to return with an explanation.

He distracts himself with a flurry of activity. Since the summer, he and Allison and Lydia and sometimes Danny have had a regular Sunday afternoon We’re Fragile Humans training session, where Allison, and sometimes one or two of her hunter minions, tries to teach him and Lydia to fight, and that plus the werewolf trainings that he tags along at once or twice a week, plus his running, is usually enough physical activity that he’s pretty confident that he’s going to make first line this year when lacrosse starts up again. He manages to pack in both a werewolf obstacle course and a Fragile Human training session, along with running almost fifteen miles, over the weekend, but on Monday he finds himself out at Derek’s house again. He’s not sure what he’s planning to do out there all by himself-- and he knows Derek isn’t even there, he’s driving Isaac and Boyd on a hilariously prosaic shopping trip to the mall a few towns over-- but he breaks out the stopwatch function on his phone and runs the obstacle course alone three times. 

Stiles is actually quite proud of the obstacle course. He likes to think of it as his own invention, although the wolves who did most-- possibly all-- of the physical effort of putting it together would probably beg to differ. And maybe they made some clever alterations during the construction process, but the original idea was his, and it’s not just a series of tunnels and walls and water hazards, although there are those, too. He got Allison to contribute non-lethal versions of some of the most commonly used hunter traps, and came up with a few attack scenarios based on his most vivid memories of the alpha pack, and the whole thing is quite spectacular. He’s doesn’t have claws, so he runs it with a wooden baton as a weapon, and his second run through shaves four whole seconds off his best time.

Tuesday afternoon finds him out there again, even though this time he knows Derek is in town. He doesn’t see Derek anywhere, though, just Boyd’s car parked by the house, and when he finishes the first run through the obstacle course Boyd is standing at the end of it watching him. 

“Derek’s still got you beat on the creepiness, man. You need to practice more,” he jokes. He hates it when the wolves just watch him train, it makes him feel so much less graceful and strong than they are. 

Boyd shrugs. “It’s true. No one creeps like Derek.”

Stiles laughs, because it always catches him off guard when Boyd makes a joke, and takes the bottle of water Boyd offers him. 

“So, are you going to man the stopwatch for me, or do you want to run it, too?” he asks, and he and Boyd do three more runs before it starts getting dark. 

 

The week goes on like that, with no word from Deaton. Running himself into the ground keeps his mind off things, or maybe his bloody nightmares are finally starting to fade a little, because although he never gets more than six hours of sleep a night that’s more than he’s gotten in a long time, and it’s enough to make him feel positively chipper in spite of himself. 

On Friday, his dad has a day off. He sleeps in, like he usually does on his days off, so Stiles doesn’t see him at breakfast. During lunch, he texts him on a whim: _Hey, you want to go to the range tomorrow?_  


His dad doesn’t know about the illegal, untraceable Smith and Wesson M&P 9mm that Allison got for him out of her dad’s weapon stash, or the box full of wolfsbane bullets that Stiles keeps in a shoebox under his bed, and the carefully arranged stack of gay porn DVDs he uses to disguise the box will keep it that way for the foreseeable future, he hopes. His dad does, however, believe in educating people about gun safety, especially people who live in a house with a cop who carries a gun, and so he and Stiles have been to the shooting range a few times over the years. They went four or five times this summer, after Allison got him the 9mm, and even though Stiles couldn’t bring his own gun or explain why he was interested in target shooting again he still had a lot of fun just hanging out with his dad, goofing off as much as you can when holding a deadly weapon.

So maybe his anxiety is manifesting in violent ways, but he’s dealing with it, and he even enjoys himself at the range, and at the training sessions he goes to over the weekend.

On Monday he gets a whole new kind of distraction. 

He’s sitting at the lunch table between Rachel and Boyd, listening to Lydia talk about her plans as head of the planning committee for the Winter Formal, when a girl he doesn’t know very well- her name is Leah, he thinks, Leah Chen maybe- comes up to their table and bounces on her heels a little like she‘s trying to get someone‘s attention. He kind of ignores her, because he figures she wants to talk to Lydia or maybe Isaac, who is looking at her like he knows her, but then she starts talking to him. 

“Hey, Stiles, right? Sorry to bother you, and I know this is a weird question, but, um, my friend was wondering if you’re gay?”

Boyd growls a little bit, so deep it’s almost not a noise at all but a vibration that travels through the floor, and she flushes. “I mean, sorry, that’s a personal question and all but she kind of wants to ask you out? But then someone was saying that you’re gay and so she was chickening out and I was going to make her ask anyway but then somehow that turned into me, uh, making sure there’s at least a theoretical chance you’d be interested. Sorry, again. I‘ll leave, right now, if you want me to. I should leave. Sorry.”

She’s about as red as a tomato by now, and Stiles is moved to take pity on a fellow babbler, so he shelves his first three responses, all sarcastic, and smiles at her. “Who’s your friend?”

“M-Michelle. Michelle Tran.” 

Stiles doesn’t know Michelle that well. She’s a junior too, but they went to different middle schools and have never had very many classes together. He’s seen her around, though, and she’s cute, in a not-too-far-out-of-his-league kind of way, and it really surprises him that she’s noticed him. People don’t, really, even if he does sit at the same table as Danny Mahealani and Lydia Martin now.

“First of all,” he says, “Even if I was gay, I wouldn’t mind if she asked me out. I wasn’t raised by wolves.” 

Lydia snorts at that. Boyd and Isaac both look hilariously offended.

“Second of all,” he continues, “I’m bisexual, for whatever that’s worth.”

“O-Ok. Thanks!” Leah stammers out, and flees back across the room. 

Stiles turns to Lydia, because she knows things. “That was weird, right?” he asks. “That was totally surreal.”

Lydia shrugs. “I admire the balls on that girl,” she says speculatively, sharp eyes on Leah as she and Michelle whisper to each other and push through the double doors out of the cafeteria.

 

 

The conversation in the lunchroom was awkward, but at least it gave him enough warning that he doesn’t panic when he sees Michelle Tran standing next to his locker at the end of the day. She’s shifting from foot to foot nervously, and he’s kind of selfishly glad for that because her nervousness makes him less so.

“Hi. Um, you probably already know what I’m going to ask, because Leah cornered you at lunch, and I’m really sorry about that, by the way, I kind of dared her to ask you but I didn’t think she’d actually do it. Girl has more swagger than she knows what to do with. Anyway,” she pauses, possibly for breath, possibly to gather her nerve. “I was hoping you’d go to the Winter Formal with me?”

If she’d asked him last year, there’s a pretty good chance he would have tripped over his own feet even though he’s standing still, just from the shock. Now, though, after spending a whole summer with Allison, who is beautiful and deadly, Rachel, who is smart and nerdy and has literal fangs, and most of all Lydia, who is both beautiful and brilliant, and who scares him even more than Derek sometimes, Michelle Tran is not so terrifying. He would also credit the Incident with Keith in the Bathroom, but that seems far removed from this experience, somehow, like the noise of the bar and the buzz from the alcohol wrapped around that memory like a cocoon, separating it from his real, sober life under the florescent lights of Beacon Hills High. 

Whatever the reason, he’s not too nervous to live now, in the face of a cute girl asking him out. The worst that happens is that he feels himself blush to the tips of his ears and he stammers a little when he says, “Yeah, yes, let’s do that. Only--” he hesitates, because it’s not like he’s a big dater and he isn’t totally sure what the protocol is when a girl asks a guy out, is he still supposed to pay? “--I wasn’t planning on going at all, so I don’t have a ticket, and I don’t think they’re selling them anymore.”

“Don’t worry,” she says. “I got it.” And she smiles. He can’t honestly say that before today he could have picked her out of a crowd, but now he can spot the features on her face that someone who really liked her would think of when they thought of her smile. 

“OK,” he says, and she’s still smiling, and he can smell her perfume, it’s sweet and fresh like strawberries in June, and then she’s saying, “OK. Great. Well, see you later then,” and melting back into the crowded hallway. And maybe Stiles isn’t technically a virgin anymore but he sure as hell feels like he is because his heart is racing like he was just fighting for his life.

 

His panic grows as he drives to the Hale house for the pack training session until he’s feeling like he’s going to throw up, because pretending to be normal and suave and attractive, even if just for one evening, might be something that is truly beyond him. He’s too jittery to be looking forward to getting tossed around by a bunch of cocky werewolves, even if he has grown to enjoy the sparring matches where he gets weapons and they don’t, so when he sees Lydia on the porch painting her fingernails and reading an Argent weapons manual-- something explosive judging from the warning symbols on the cover-- he bypasses the front yard where Rachel and the boys are warming up and makes a beeline for the step next to her.

“Lydia, oh my god, you have to help me,” he moans, and flops down. It’s almost Thanksgiving, and it sucks to be outside in the cold, but at least the porch is dry and stable. After Isaac fell through the floorboards in the living room and nearly impaled himself on a piece of iron rebar in the basement underneath, Derek decreed that no one without supernatural healing powers was allowed in the house. He even boarded up the door, although the windows gape open so it’s not like the house is inaccessible. Stiles wishes Derek would just have the place torn down, maybe build a new house even, but he’s not cruel enough to tell Derek so. Or maybe he’s just too cowardly to bear the thought of the look on Derek’s face. And it’s not like Derek still sleeps here, he has a studio in town now.

Lydia raises one perfect eyebrow at him. “Freaking out because Michelle asked you to the Formal?”

“No!” he protests, wounded. “Well, OK, yes. I don’t know what to wear!”

Lydia laughs. “I am not your gay best friend, Stilinski.”

“No, you’re a goddess who is both the prettiest and most fashionable girl in school,” he says, laying it on thick because Lydia loves it when people flatter her. Besides, it’s the truth. “And you’re brilliant, and clever, and no one could help me like you can if you have mercy on me.”

“You make a good argument,” Lydia says, and blows on her nails, and her pursed lips hide her smile, but she can’t hide the twinkle in her eyes. “You know, I didn’t actually think you’d say yes.”

Stiles shrugs. “You do realize Michelle is literally the first person to ask me out on an actual date who wasn’t coerced into it by Allison Argent? It’s not like I was going to say no. Besides, she’s cute, and normal, and maybe she’ll make out- I mean, dance with me. I’m seventeen, what do you expect!”

Lydia passes him her phone. “Here’s a picture of the dress she’s wearing. You should wear a dark gray suit, we’ll go shopping tomorrow.”

“How do you know these things all the time?” Stiles asks, impressed. Apparently Lydia is way ahead of him. “It’s like magic. Are you secretly magic?”

Lydia huffs like an amused werewolf, and Stiles is stabbed through with fondness for her and his pack. “I got Leah’s number after lunch and asked her to the formal. I mean, she’s cute, and normal, and maybe…” she trails off, letting his brain follow the echo of his previous statement to its conclusion, then laughing wickedly at the astonished expression on his face. “Oh, relax. We’re going as friends.”

Stiles can’t get his mouth to shut properly. His brain has completely short-circuited at the image of Lydia and Leah Chen making out.

“I think you broke him,” Boyd says, leaning against the porch railing. It looks like the wolves are done warming up, and, oh good, a distraction from the way Lydia and Boyd are laughing at him.

Derek is directing Rachel and Scott in a sparring match, his back to the house, and Stiles finds himself expecting Derek to turn around, make eye contact, acknowledge that, yes, he overheard the conversation with Lydia. Stiles knows Derek heard, he’s only like a dozen yards away, and he wants to see Derek’s face, see him laughing at the idea of Stiles going on a real date with a pretty high school girl, but Derek never turns around.

 

 

The Winter Formal on Friday night is better than last year’s, Stiles thinks, probably due to Lydia’s guiding hand putting it together. He doesn’t have much chance to stand back and observe the dance as a whole, though, because Michelle picks him up in her mom’s cherry red Subaru and he only has a few minutes to make nervous conversation with this girl he barely knows before they’re walking in the doors of the school and right onto the dance floor. Michelle is a decent dancer, or at least she’s confident enough to fake it, and Stiles wishes he was drunk enough to fool himself into feeling graceful. She doesn’t seem to mind him stepping on her feet or knocking her with his elbow, though, and he makes her laugh twice during the first song, and, weirdly, she isn’t the only one who wants to dance with him. 

He dances with Danny, of course, and does a turn each with Scott, Boyd, and Boyd’s date, Amy. Then he sees Rachel, looking sexy as fuck in a femininely tailored suit, and he dances with her for two songs to make up for the fact that he can’t seem to pry Lydia away from Leah. It’s not just the pack who want to dance with him, though. He dances with Michelle again for three songs, then gets grabbed away by a girl who’s name he doesn’t even know but who he thinks is Michelle’s friend, and then another girl from his Physics class, and then her date. Stiles thinks his name might be Ben. 

By the time he starts getting tired, he finds Michelle again. She’s standing with one of the guys Stiles vaguely recognizes as a senior who’s on the swim team, and when he walks over with two plastic cups of punch, her friend offers them both a dash from a flask he pulls out of his pocket. They hang out on the sidelines for a few drinks, supplemented with vodka from the flask, and then Michelle pulls him back out onto the dance floor. 

A slow song is playing, something with romantic female vocals, and Stiles is surprised to find that he’s actually enjoying himself. He’s glad to be here, with this girl, at this stupid school dance, it makes him feel young and happy and innocent enough to be reckless, and so when Michelle stretches up to reach his ear-- because she’s like a foot shorter than he is, she‘s seriously tiny-- and says, “Hey, you want to get out of here?” he agrees.

She leads him by the hand back out to her car, giggly from the vodka, and when he offers to drive, because he’s not as tipsy as she is, she lets him on the condition that he turns wherever she tells him to. They drive aimlessly around the dark streets for a while, and then end up parked out by Beacon Preserve, and Stiles knows where this is heading so he’s not surprised when Michelle tumbles into the backseat and pulls him back with her. 

She pushes him back into the seat and straddles his lap, then kisses him, soft and wet and gentle. He likes it, but he still barely knows her, and he wasn’t expecting this, so he has to make sure. He pulls back so he can see her face, says, “You know we don’t have to do anything if you don’t want. I mean, this is pretty much perfect already. I’m talking, like, end of the movie, riding off into the sunset kind of perfect school dance. I didn’t think dances this fun happened in real life.”

She laughs a little bit, and when she does she scrunches up her nose in a way that is truly adorable, and she says, “I know. But I want to,” and kisses him again.

Then she’s unbuttoning his shirt and his hands are gliding around her waist to the small of her back where her dress dips so low he can smooth his fingers over her skin. Her fingers are hot where they slide up his side, and he doesn’t know how she can keep kissing him so soft and sweet and molten and move her hands like that at the same time, because he can barely manage to hold on and kiss back. 

She doesn’t seem to mind, though, and when he can’t help himself from curling his fingers in tight where they’ve settled low on her waist, she breathes out a little ‘oh’ like she _likes_ it, and pushes forward on his lap until her mouth is pressed behind his ear and her breasts are almost close enough to lick, all soft curves that catch the dim light and make his mouth water, and she smells like strawberries, still, and sweat and vodka and human being. He can feel her breath in his ear, which is almost annoying, but they’re not kissing anymore, so he has enough brain function to move his hands, and the way she’s pressed up against him means that her legs are spread wide around him and her dress is hitched up her thighs. He runs his palm down her lower back, over her ass, to the side of her thigh, and lets himself dig in his fingers, just a little bit. It’s a good thing he doesn’t have claws, because he wouldn’t have been able to keep them blunt when the breath punches out of her again, this soft little noise, and she moves her hips like honey. He’s pretty sure she can feel exactly how hard he is.

She kisses him again, gentle and hungry at the same time, and her mouth is so warm and smooth, the far end of the spectrum from stubble and jawbone, and he likes it, likes the way she seems content to take her time. Likes the way she pushes and pulls at him each time she dips down to his mouth, the encouraging noises she makes when his fingers creep up her skirt until he‘s pressing his palm against her ass, skin against skin. He likes that she isn‘t wearing any underwear.

He’s never thought of himself as someone who could go nonverbal, has always been a talker, but there’s definitely something up with his higher brain function by the time, he doesn’t know how much later, she pulls away from his mouth and says, “I have condoms.”

“I, uh. OK. Yes,” is what he says in response, and he’s impressed at how efficiently she slides off him onto the seat beside him, unzips his pants, pulls down his pants and boxers, and frees his cock. She makes a sexy, perfect noise when she sees it, and he makes an undignified noise when she wraps her fingers around him and moves as gently as she kisses. 

It would feel even better if she used a little more force, but her light touch is probably a good thing because he manages not to embarrass himself by coming before she even gets the condom on him, and then she’s unrolling the latex down his cock and straddling him again. She sinks down onto him, all glorious tight heat, and moans like a fucking porn star right in his ear, and he’s thinking about calculus and the wikipedia article on the history of concrete and half a dozen different spells that require knowledge of someone’s true name in an effort to keep this from being over immediately.

The noises she makes are fucking amazing. Stiles is suspended, weightless, as she moves against him for he doesn’t know how long, her hand pressing his shoulder back into the seat the only thing anchoring him in reality. She reaches down between them, touching herself, gasping and clenching around him, and he’s vibration and light and heat and he can barely breathe and then he’s holding onto her hips and coming.

She slides off him and does something- he can’t see what in the dark- with the condom, and he’s not quite ready to move yet, but she looks at the clock on the dashboard and says, “Oh crap, it’s late,” even though it’s only 12:30. Maybe she has a curfew, or maybe she doesn’t really want to talk to him after fucking his brains out, but either way she climbs into the driver’s seat and turns the car on. 

He manages to collect himself, and by the time she drops him off at his empty house even his jacket is buttoned. She doesn’t get out of the car to kiss him goodnight, but she smiles when he leans in for a quick peck at her lips and she says, “I’ll call you tomorrow or something.” He smiles back, and if the house is cold when he unlocks the front door he doesn’t mind that much.

 

He has the frozen nightmare again that night, only this time, instead of Andrew Wright, it’s Dr. Deaton who freezes to death in front of him.

He texts Derek when he wakes up shaking at 2 am: _Having creepy dreams again. Plot twist: now they feature Deaton_ , and only after he hits send and lets his phone slip through his fingers and thump onto his chest does he stare up at his dark ceiling and wonder why that was his first instinct. Derek’s the alpha, sure, whatever, but Scott’s his best friend and therefore required to listen to as many of Stiles‘ bad dreams as he feels like recounting, and, hell, he should be talking to Deaton himself, the one person who might actually know what‘s happening. He promises himself that he’ll text Scott in a minute, once the nightmare adrenaline wears off, and when he wakes up again his phone is going off and the sun is shining in his eyes. 

“Dude, did you get lucky last night?” Scott’s voice blares in his ear, too loud and cheerful for 10 am. 

“What.” Stiles says. The long hours of sleep haven’t erased the nightmare tension. He can still feel the sweat dried on his skin.

“Boyd said you and Michelle looked like you were having fun when you left the dance last night. Spill, man, I want to know how it went.”

  
_Oh_. Stiles quashes a wave of irritation that Scott’s reaction this time is so different than his reaction the last time Stiles hooked up with someone he barely knew, because it’s not due to homophobia or Scott being an asshole. Mostly. Scott is only ever an asshole on accident, anyway. Stiles isn’t really in the mood for high fives, but he manages to come up with, “Look, Michelle is a very nice girl, and we respect each other. I mean, we respected each other, in her car, parked out by the Preserve.”

“Nice!” Scott sounds genuinely happy for him, because he’s Scott, and even when he’s being a dudebro he only wants the best for his friends. 

“Hey, have you heard from Deaton?” Stiles changes the subject.

“Yeah, that’s the other reason I’m calling, actually. He emailed me to say that he’s traveling back to Beacon Hills now and he’ll be at the clinic tomorrow. I have a shift tomorrow afternoon, so you could swing by the clinic then and talk to him about the dreams.”

“OK.” He’d rather talk to Deaton now, but hopefully one day’s delay won’t cause a disaster.

After he hangs up with Scott, he squints at the sun and grabs his running shoes. He usually just takes the sidewalk in front of his house wherever it leads him, but he also usually runs before the sun comes up, when there are no cars on the road. He tells himself that he doesn’t want to stop at every corner for traffic and that’s why he drives out to the running trail in the woods, but the truth is that he knows he’s headed in the direction of the Hale house. When the house edges into view and he sees Derek watching him from a stand of trees, like Derek is a deer startled almost to bolting by an unexpected human presence, he feels like he can breathe easier, even though he’s been running for three miles and his throat burns from panting in the cold.

He trots up to the porch steps and sits down, waits for Derek to break out of creeper mode and drift over to sit a step down from him.

“It’s the exact same dream,” he says, no preamble. He used to hate the way Derek couldn’t seem to talk like a normal person, the way he rushes through the “hello, how are you” part of a conversation like he doesn’t see the point in pretending to be friendly when he hates the world _so much_ , but now Stiles kind of likes not holding back from just saying what’s on his mind. Talking to Derek is not like talking to anyone else. 

“The only difference is that now it’s Deaton I see freezing to death. I hate this.” He picks at the side of his shoe so he doesn’t have to look over at Derek while he talks. When he does glance over, Derek is looking out at the trees. “I hate not knowing what’s happening in my own head, and I think something bad is going on, Derek, something really bad.”

Derek sighs. “Deaton is powerful. He knows powerful people. And you had the dreams for a long time, the first time. There‘s time still to figure it out.”

“That’s what I keep telling myself.”

Stiles doesn’t know when it happened that he couldn’t go to his dad or Scott with his fears, the real true fears that threatened to swallow him whole. It’s been a long time, maybe as far back as the day he and Scott went looking for a body in the woods. Maybe farther. He doesn’t remember when Derek became the one person he could reveal his fears to, either, but he does know why he can. Derek is angry and brash and the face he shows the world is hard as iron, but he knows fear, all the flavors and textures of it, and he knows exactly how much there is in the world that’s worth being afraid of. Stiles trusts him to weigh Stiles’ fears and accurately tell him how serious they really are, and he treasures that.

“You ever heard of anyone having dreams like this?” he asks after a minute.

“No,” Derek admits.

The wind is picking up, ferrying clouds across the sun, and the sweatshirt and basketball shorts that were warm enough when he was running really aren’t now that the sweat has chilled on his skin. He should probably start the run back to his car before he freezes. 

“Want to spar?” Derek asks. He’s still looking off into the trees, and Stiles can’t get a good read on his expression. His shoulders are almost relaxed, though, enough that Stiles wonders if Derek is in a good mood, if he actually genuinely wants to spar with Stiles. Usually Derek is the one supervising while Stiles gets knocked around by Scott or Boyd, but they’ve sparred together before. Those times Derek mostly seemed frustrated at how breakable he was, but maybe he‘s bored, or maybe there‘s just no one else to spar with. 

“Sure,” he says, and that’s the right answer because Derek is bouncing up from the steps and disappearing into the house for all of two seconds before he returns with a blunt practice knife as long as his forearm and tosses it to Stiles.

The match is exactly what Stiles needs. Sparring with Derek makes him feel focused and confident in a way that running and lacrosse and even video games have never been able to match. Derek pushes him to the limit of his speed and strength, even as he’s carefully holding himself back. And maybe Stiles will never be truly graceful, but even when Derek throws him across the clearing, winces at the way he lands, and gets sidetracked for twenty minutes knocking him down over and over to force him to practice falling without hurting himself, the fight pulls him out of his mind, away from his anxiety. He’s going to have some ugly new bruises on his hips and knees and shoulder blades, but he also manages to get in two separate killing blows that Derek didn’t see coming, and an hour later when he collapses on his back on the cold, wet grass and breathes until his heart rate goes back to normal, some of the tension that’s been racing through him since he woke up at 2 am is gone.

 

 

He’s jittery as soon as he wakes up again the next morning, Deaton’s dying face still echoing through his veins, and he doesn’t want to wait until Scott’s shift to talk to Deaton. His dad ambushes him, though, with a list of chores to finish before he’s allowed to leave the house, and by the time he’s done vacuuming and washing the windows and scrubbing the kitchen floor he has just enough time to pick up Scott and take him to work.

The bell that rings over the front door is a comfort, a sense memory that tells his brainstem _you’re safe here_ , but he starts getting an unpleasantly familiar sinister feeling on the back of his neck as soon as he sets eyes on Dr. Deaton standing behind the counter running a credit card for an older woman with a cat carrier in her hand. It’s a cold feeling, a sick curl right behind his belly button, and it reminds him of his nightmare but it also reminds him, more strongly than he’s been reminded in a long time, of standing in the police station pinned by the barrel of Matt‘s gun, Matt‘s eyes like chips of ice.

Scott heads to the back to start cleaning cages or whatever, cheerful and oblivious as always, and Stiles sinks into a chair in the waiting room, glad that the chatty cat lady is giving him a chance to think. If he paid attention to his instincts right now, he’d bolt out the door, but that doesn’t make a damn bit of sense. _Deaton isn’t a threat. Deaton is the one in danger_ , he tells himself, but he doesn’t have to be a werewolf to know that he doesn’t believe what he‘s saying. He doesn’t know why he doesn’t believe it, but that doesn’t change the way his stomach feels like it wants to run out the door, the rest of his body attached or not.

He only gets a couple minutes to agonize about it before the woman and her cat carrier are waving at Deaton as they exit and Deaton is smiling at him, voice as placid as always when he says, “Stiles. Scott tells me you have some questions for me about dreams you’ve been having?”

He hasn’t actually decided on a plan, his mouth just moves on without him. “Uh, yeah, weird dreams. They’re probably nothing, but I thought I’d see if you have any books on, like premonitions or seeing, uh, other people’s fates or whatever. Because that would be cool, fortune telling that is. You can even make a little money doing that, unlike defending a pack of werewolves. There is zero money in that career as far as I can tell.”

“Hmm.” Stiles does _not_ like the look Deaton gives him, like he’s seeing right through Stiles’ attempt to downplay whatever Scott’s already said, and unimpressed at Stiles‘ humor on top of that. At least Stiles didn’t give him any new information other than what Scott seems to have told him already, and made it seem like Stiles isn’t freaking out. It’s a good thing Deaton isn’t a wolf, or he’d hear the heart attack Stiles is about to have for no goddamn reason that he can figure out. Stiles just wants out of this office, away from Deaton so he can figure out what the fuck to think. 

Maybe Deaton buys it, or maybe he just doesn’t care and Stiles is misreading this whole situation, because Deaton ushers him back into his office, picks two books off his bookshelf and hands them over without a protest. He even looks amused when Stiles flails as he says goodbye, and that’s so typically Deaton that Stiles almost convinces himself that this awful feeling he’s getting from the situation is all in his head, completely unfounded. 

It probably was just him freaking out over nothing, because the books that Deaton loaned him are perfect. The primer on interpreting dreams isn’t all that helpful, but mostly because the dream is so short and realistic there’s little to interpret. The second book is cheaply bound, like it was published in someone’s garage, and maybe it actually was because it reads like someone’s personal recipe collection, with spells and rituals and commentary half-organized and haphazardly annotated. At least it’s all typed; Deaton has several handwritten books that are so old they’re falling apart and nearly impossible to read. He takes his time going through the second one, skimming each page carefully to make sure he doesn’t miss anything, and about a third of the way through he finds a charm to intensify dreams.

It’s not exactly what he’s looking for, and the thought of making his nightmares more potent and terrifying makes his throat a little dry, but he tucks a bookmark into the page anyway, because if he can get more detail from the dream that wouldn’t be a bad thing. He keeps reading until midnight but he doesn’t find anything better, so he grabs acid-free paper, ilex ink and the hollow pen Derek bought him for his birthday back in June out from the back of his desk drawer and studies the spell more closely. 

It’s fairly straightforward, and it takes less than three minutes to draw, even counting the time it takes to sketch out the triangular knot work pattern in pencil beforehand. He just has to ink ‘mattur einbeita sannleikur’ around the edges and blow on it to dry the ink, and that’s it, it‘s ready to tuck under his pillow so it can work its mojo while he sleeps. 

When it actually works, it surprises him. Magic surprises him, still, he’s still new enough at this that his first emotional reaction to any spell is gleeful shock, _Oh my god_ I _did that_. He’s not sure how that can coexist with the belief magic requires, how he can hold belief and surprise in his head at the same time, but it works. Holy fuck, it actually works.

Even in the dream, in spite of the irrational nightmare terror, most of what he’s thinking is self-congratulatory surprise when he realizes that he’s getting a much wider view of the room. The bare concrete floor stretches out to rough-mortared cinderblock walls, with high small windows set in only one side. There are cobwebs and traces of sawdust in the corners. A garage then, or an unfinished basement, or -- and if there are hunters involved this unfortunately isn’t a stretch -- some kind of custom-constructed holding-cell-slash-dungeon. Stiles can’t see a door anywhere, but he can’t manipulate the dream enough to look behind him, so he can’t decide which possibility is most likely.

Deaton is lying flat and still on the floor, but this time Stiles can see this weird cloudiness around him, like someone snagged a jet contrail out of the sky and used it to bind Deaton’s limbs to his body.

The rest of the dream proceeds as usual, all stillness and freezing cold and panic. He feels it all, so vivid and close he can smell his own terror, and it’s a relief when Deaton’s eyes turn solid and clear and icy and he jerks awake, shaking with adrenaline and the urge to bolt like prey. It’s a dozen times worse than any nightmare he’s had before, and he barely makes it to the bathroom before he vomits.

  
_It’s just a dream_ , he tells himself while he sits on the linoleum and rests his head against the wall. _It’s not real_. He doesn’t believe a word of it.

 

 

Stiles’ eyes feel like they have sand in them, and his thoughts are chasing themselves in circles too quickly for him to pay attention in any of his morning classes, but by the time he drops himself into the chair next to Lydia at their lunch table he feels like he’s starting to form some solid theories. He’s at the point in his thought process where he really wants to talk out what he’s thinking to help him decide if his ideas are any good or not, but before he can start his monologue on how to tell if a dream should be taken literally or metaphorically, Isaac smirks at him. “Our baby boy is all grown up now.”

Right. In his stress over Deaton and whether he was losing his fucking mind, he’s almost forgotten the other events of this weekend. Stiles never ever expected to be the kind of person who didn’t even blink when he lost his sex-with-a-girl virginity, but he’s starting to think that the current supernatural crisis is going to turn out to be as bad as any of the others he’s seen -- and seriously, what is his life that there are multiple previous supernatural crises to compare to. There’s only been one body so far, but he’d really like to be able to prevent any more deaths for once, especially if the next person in line is Deaton -- strange sinister vibes notwithstanding, Stiles _likes_ Deaton -- so he’d rather be focusing on solving the mystery here, not recounting his own sexual conquests. 

Well. He is pretty proud that he has sexual conquests now. Immanent death overrules sexy times, he’s pretty sure, but he is pretty proud.

“Oh please,” Lydia looks at Isaac scornfully. “Everyone knows that virginity is a patriarchal social construct that privileges heterosexual sex. You can be an adult without getting involved with putting a penis in a vagina.” 

“Hear, hear,” Danny says.

Isaac visibly doesn’t know how to react to that, and she continues, grinning like a shark. “Still, I’m glad to know I’m not the only one who had a good time at the dance on Friday.”

Isaac’s eyes kind of bug out, and Stiles is distracted by the thought of Lydia’s perfect mouth kissing Leah Chen’s less-perfect-but-still-sexy lips. Or… other bits. God, why did he ever decide to get over his crush on Lydia?

“Wait.” Scott looks adorably confused. “You and Leah? I thought- I didn’t know you were a lesbian.”

Lydia flips her hair dismissively. “There’s a lot you don’t know, Scott,” she says fondly. “And I haven’t really decided anyway. But I want to hear about Stiles having awkward virgin sex.”

Stiles’ “What!” is almost a yelp. “No way, my sex life is none of your business. And even if it was, you’d be disappointed, because any sex I may or may not be having is a) not awkward, because I’m awesome, and b) not virginal, see above.”

Lydia raises her eyebrows. Scott says, “Wait-- are you counting--” but Stiles cuts him off. “Not talking about it, Scott. We have bigger fish.”

Scott looks skeptical. “Like what?”

“Like, I think something is wrong with Deaton. Did you, like, smell anything _off_ about him at the clinic yesterday?”

“No. He smelled totally normal. I mean, he smelled a little like the airport, but that makes sense, because that’s where he was. Why? Did he tell you something when you talked to him?”

Stiles shoves his chicken salad sandwich in his mouth to give himself a second to figure out how to explain. He looks up to see a circle of faces waiting expectantly, and he doesn’t know how or when he became the kind of person a bunch of sassy teenage werewolves respect enough to occasionally listen to, but it’s hell of intimidating when they do. And also a little flattering. 

“Uh, I didn’t really talk to Deaton _in depth_ so much as I got some very bad vibes off him as soon as I saw him and bullshitted -- bullshat? Hmm -- my way out of his office as fast as possible. And he’s still featuring in my creepy dreams, man, every night like a horror movie.”

“Yeah, but,” Scott looks offended. “I thought you said he was, like, the victim in the dream. Not the villain!”

“Do you really think Deaton is up to something?” Boyd looks skeptical, which is typical.

“Well, yeah,” Stiles says, knowing they’re going to argue. Respect only goes so far. “Yeah, I do.”

“Just because you had a strange feeling in his office?” Yep, Boyd is very skeptical. Stiles doesn’t blame him-- he mostly doesn’t believe it himself. But he knows what he felt.

“No way, man!” Scott looks like he’s working himself up to be genuinely upset. “This is Deaton we’re talking about. He’s not-- he’s not evil!”

“Remember last year,” Stiles says, trying not to sound frustrated. “When I kept telling you that there was something scary about Matt, and then he turned out to be seriously disturbed, and stalking your girlfriend, and, oh yeah, a _kanima controlling murderer_? Remember that? I do!”

Scott’s face is mulish. “Deaton isn’t Matt. He’s not a murderer.”

“Ugh!” Stiles throws his hands up. “Can you just trust me for once?”

“Maybe he’s possessed,” Danny breaks in. “Like, maybe the Deaton we all know and love is being controlled by something that _is_ evil, and that’s what you’re getting vibes about, Stiles.”

Stiles feels kind of dumb that he didn’t think of that possibility before now, and Scott is relaxing now that he isn’t being forced to be suspicious of someone he likes. Only in Beacon Hills is the very real prospect of fucking _demon possession_ relaxing, but Stiles will take it if it means Scott will stop arguing with him.

“Great,” he says. “So Deaton is maybe possessed. Do you want to help me break into his house and look around while he’s at work this afternoon?”

Scott looks offended all over again. “No! You should just go talk to him for real, not _break into his house_!”

“If he’s possessed, talking to him will just let the demon know we’re suspicious,” Lydia says. Stiles is glad he’s not the only reasonable person at the table. 

“I feel like we should be able to smell a demon,” Isaac says in that dreamy-psycho voice he gets when he thinks seriously about violent things. 

“What? How could you smell something that doesn’t have a physical presence?” This is a distracting idea. “There wouldn’t be any particles for your nose to pick up.”

“I think a demon would smell like magic,” Isaac says, which, again-- no physical particles, that makes no sense. “Smell is probably the wrong word for it.”

Ugh. Werewolf senses make him so fucking jealous sometimes.

“Do we even know if demons are a thing?” Boyd asks.

Stiles shrugs. He knows better than to write off the existence of anything supernatural, but no, he doesn’t know. It makes as much sense as anything else, though.

“If they are, I wonder what mythos got them right,” Rachel muses. “I’ve always liked the _Supernatural_ version, where demons come from human souls, but do you think the traditional Catholic version is more likely to be true?”

Stiles almost sighs. He’s the only one with ADHD here, but this conversation is going way off the rails. He can feel it disintegrating into a discussion of whether or not God is real, which, ew. So unappealing. “You could break into Deaton’s house with me, and maybe we’ll find out,” he offers.

Rachel brushes her hand along the back of her head sheepishly. “I can’t, I have to work. I’m free on Wednesday if you want to wait for me.”

Boyd has to work too, Danny doesn’t need any more crimes on his record, Scott just shakes his head, stubborn, and Lydia looks at her nails, which are clipped shorter and blunter than Stiles has seen them since they were kids, and says something about a study date, which leaves Isaac.

He shakes his head uneasily. “Are you sure breaking into Deaton’s house is the thing to do? I mean, we are talking about the most powerful witch we know, who may or may not be possessed by a demon, or something else that we don’t even know about but which is almost certainly evil.” He pauses, then has a thought that makes him look relieved. “You should ask Derek for help. He’s much scarier than I am.”

Right. Looks like he’s engaging in some B&E all by his lonesome, then.

 

 

Deaton lives in a small green ranch-style house in a quiet neighborhood not too far from the animal clinic, and Stiles is loitering as inconspicuously as possible on the sidewalk under one of the trees that line the road, hoping the early December dusk and his dark brown knit cap and scarf will keep any of the neighbors from remembering him later. Deaton has an impressive electronic alarm system, he can see the little warning sign put out by the company to deter break ins, and he can see the subtle traces of a comprehensive network of magical wards. Deaton spent a weekend teaching him about wards back during the thing with Ms. Morrell, and he recognizes all the wards that are on the animal clinic-- there are more than just the mountain ash lining the walls, a lot more-- and spots a couple he doesn’t know on top of that. He’s thinking over his approach to the house-- a Pass-Through might cover him with both the magical and physical alarm systems, if he does it right-- when the back of his neck prickles. 

He turns and manages not to jump out of his skin even though Derek is standing right behind him, all casual, like it’s normal to just appear behind someone like you’re there to assassinate them. The corner of his mouth twitches up in what might be a smirk, and Stiles lets himself splutter indignantly about what a creeper Derek is to distract himself from how fucking edible he looks, his leather jacket unzipped and the bare skin of his throat glowing white as the moon in the near dark. Stiles has kind of gotten used to his impossible attraction to Derek, but some days it’s harder to sublimate than others, and Derek-- Derek looks really good tonight. It might be the smile.

Stiles half expects Derek to try to stop him from breaking in, lecture him on how stupid he’s being and what a bad idea this is, but Derek just rides out Stiles’ insults and then says, calm as anything, “Isaac said you might want a hand.”

Stiles can’t help but smile at him, because while half the time talking to Derek is like talking to a really angry wall, the other half it’s more like talking to a really deep lake, which is to say he’s kind of restful to be around, and it looks like today is going to be the second kind. Stiles is grateful for the company. “You’re just in time. I was about to add a count of breaking and entering to my rap sheet all by myself.”

Derek just grunts and steps toward the house like he’s going to pull his signature break-in-through-the-window move and isn‘t at all impressed with the challenge of a house that doesn‘t even have second story windows, but Stiles stops him with a hand on his shoulder.

“Hey, hold on. We need to circumvent his alarm systems or he’s going to catch us in the act and probably flay us with his mind or something. Even if he isn’t possessed-- which is Rachel’s theory, by the way-- he’d be pissed about me waltzing into his house.”

Derek’s eyebrows do that thing they do when he’s considering asking a question, and he says, “You have a plan.”

“’Course I have a plan.” Stiles grins at him. “Just hold on a sec.” He pulls his pocketknife out and rucks up the sleeve of his coat so his wrist is exposed. Derek makes this small aborted jerk of his hand that Stiles interprets as, “Don’t harm your puny human self when I’m standing here with my awesome werewolf healing super powers,” so he shrugs apologetically, says, “It has to be human blood,” and sinks the blade through the skin on the side of his wrist.

The blade is razor sharp, and even though the cut is shallow, away from the major veins, and less than an inch long, the blood wells up in fat viscous drops. Stiles slips the knife back into his pocket, lifts up the hem of his shirt and smears bloody letters onto the skin of his stomach with one finger, which, hey, is way more awkward to do when being watched by a werewolf with the body of a Greek god.

“Alright, your turn,” he says, fighting down a blush, but Derek has his head cocked like he‘s listening to something. “What’s up?”

“That’s a really odd feeling,” Derek says, looking unsettled.

“What is?” 

“It’s like you disappeared out of the pack,” Derek says, which is good, it means the Pass-Through worked, but also, what?

“I’m in the pack?” Stiles asks. 

“What? Of course--” Derek starts to say, face as grumpy as Stiles has ever seen it, and Stiles has to wave a hand in his face to cut him off.

“No no, I mean, I just didn’t know that I was actually magically attached to the pack like the wolves are. I thought that only happened when someone gets the bite. Weird.” Stiles has known that he’s part of the pack for a while now, pretty much since the alpha pack came into town and Scott officially submitted to Derek, so there’s no reason this should be making him feel all warm and fuzzy, but it does. 

He’s struck by a thought. “If I magic you up, is the whole pack going to feel you go missing? I don’t want to panic the puppies. Maybe you should stay outside.”

Derek just glares at him, that glare that Stiles knows better than to take seriously anymore and now just finds oddly sexy. Which is not a thought he should be having right now, bad Stiles. Derek pulls his phone out of his pocket, and a few seconds later Stiles gets a mass text: _Stiles is trying a spell, don’t panic_.

“Fine.” Stiles squeezes more blood out of his wrist. “Your turn.”

Derek starts to lift his shirt up obediently, and Stiles gets a good view of his abs, which, fuck, he cannot put his hands there, so he waves his hands vaguely and says, “Actually, let me put it along your collarbone, it’ll be easier to write it all in one line.” It won’t actually be easier, since Derek will have to hold the collar of his shirt out of the way, but apparently Stiles’ dick has been possessed or something because he seriously can’t handle touching Derek’s abs without getting turned on, and Derek will probably smell it on him and then kill him with his teeth. 

Not that Derek’s collarbone is much better. Derek steps in close enough that to any neighbors observing out their windows it probably looks like they’re on the verge of making out, not performing blood magic. Which is, objectively, a good plan, but it means that Stiles can feel the heat radiating off Derek’s chest, can feel his breath ghosting over Stiles’ ear as he keeps his head bowed and focused on his work. Careful to touch Derek with just the one bloody fingertip, he spells out _fara yfir fara i_ , and as soon as he’s done he steps back and clears his throat. Thank fuck the Pass-Through is so short, he’s got fucking goose bumps that aren’t from the cold and what the fuck is up with his body’s responses today? Derek is always sexy, of course, and it’s not like he’s never gotten a boner from Derek throwing him around and pushing him up against things, but this is a bit excessive.

“That’ll make the wards, like, bend around us,” Stiles says, letting his words cover up whatever this shit he’s feeling is. “It’s like one of those complicated mirror arrays that bend lasers around an object and then back onto their original path. Or a cloak of invisibility! Well, invisibility to anything that doesn’t have eyes, which, OK, is not quite what invisible means. But it’ll get us through all the wards here, I think.”

“Why do people even bother with wards if it’s this easy to fool them?” Derek asks. Apparently he’s willing to go along with Stiles’ chatter today. Maybe he didn’t even notice anything off.

“Why bother locking your doors when some delinquent with a bump key can come along and unlock them?” Stiles responds, and produces said key with a grin, along with an extra pair of latex gloves that he hands over. “Put these on, your fingerprints are in the system.”

“No thanks to you,” Derek says, but he pulls the gloves on without an argument. “I feel like I should be a little disturbed at how comfortable you are with this.” Derek must be in a good mood if he’s making jokes. 

“Yeah, yeah, I’m a criminal, my dad would be so disappointed in me if he knew,” Stiles says, and if that’s true it’s still kind of funny, and then they’re inside.

Deaton’s house is conservatively decorated, immaculately tidy, and utterly conventional. The kitchen is clearly used every day: there are dishes drying next to the sink, a healthy stock of staples, a spice cupboard that is impressively wide-ranging but still within the bounds of what someone might keep just for cooking. There is nothing of note in the bathroom or bedroom, except for the box of condoms Stiles discovers in Deaton’s sock drawer. He spends a good ten minutes searching the closets and wondering who the hell Deaton has sex with, but doesn’t find the answer to that question or anything sinister. The living room is lined with bookshelves, which isn’t surprising, but while Stiles sees a few books that he definitely wants to borrow and memorize, there’s a lot more fiction than he expected. There’s even a whole shelf of romance novels, which, honestly, he finds even more surprising than the condoms. 

Stiles saves the office for last, but even that is anti-climactic. Deaton’s magical supplies aren’t much different than what he keeps at the animal clinic: neatly labeled glass bottles full of dried herbs, powders and pastes; a case full of amulets and trinkets; another case with a selection of rune-inscribed weapons; a shelf full of books that are more worn and fragile than those in the living room but that have titles like _Medicinal Plants of Southeast Asia_ and _Theories of Zoroastrian Cosmology_. He flips through every page of them anyway, of course, hoping for a clue to flutter out from between the pages, but nothing incriminating catches his eye. 

Stiles huffs in frustration and sits back on his heels next to the desk, which as far as he can tell has no secret drawers or compartments whatsoever. Derek appears in the doorway as if summoned.

“Any luck?” Stiles asks. 

Derek shakes his head. “You?”

“Nope. I was hoping for, I don’t know, an altar with bloodstained skulls and dripping candles and a book open to the page that says: How to Open a Gate to Hell, or How to Summon Your Demonic Master, or something. Not that I want a Hellmouth opened in Beacon Hills. I just want to know what’s going on with my brain.” Stiles rubs his palms harshly over the sides of his head like the offending organ is physically paining him. He would take physical pain over being stumped like this any day.

“There is…” Derek starts, hesitant, and Stiles sits at attention. “There’s a smell. Very faint. I don’t recognize it, but it’s a little like snow. Or electricity. Like cold, wet lightning.”

“Huh.” Stiles thinks for a second. It wouldn’t surprise him if that’s what magic smells like, but then Deaton is a witch, the smell of magic in his house might not mean anything more than that. “Can you pin it down? Where’s it coming from?”

Derek shakes his head like there’s water in his ears. “It’s everywhere, hanging in the air. But like I said, it’s very faint.”

“Well,” Stiles says, “that’s something, I guess. I just wish I knew what.” And that’s pretty much that, except for replacing everything exactly the way it was when they broke in, and locking up behind them when they leave.

 

 

Stiles expects Derek to take off into the woods or wherever he came from-- Stiles parked his Jeep three streets away, and he doesn’t see Derek’s Camaro anywhere but maybe he had the same thought-- but Derek just kind of tags along on the walk back to the Jeep and when Stiles opens the drivers’ side door Derek is looking at him and kind of scratching an eyebrow awkwardly, and then he says, “You hungry? We could get burgers.”

Sitting in a diner with Derek Hale, sexy ex-murder suspect and tragic alpha werewolf, seems like it should be more awkward than it is, because they might be friends now, but this is not the kind of friends they are. They save each other‘s lives and curse at each other for getting blood on the car seats and even, sometimes, end up in social situations where the pack is all hanging out together, but they don‘t just, like, call each other up and go out to eat. Stiles hopes that none of the adults in his life happen to see them, because while his dad is aware that Stiles is friends with Isaac and Boyd now, and they in turn are seen around town with Derek from time to time, seeing Derek and Stiles spending time just the two of them would be a whole other thing that he doesn’t want to have to explain away. 

His impulse to duck under the table whenever the door opens is the only thing that makes it awkward, though. Derek is in a chatty mood, for him anyway, talking about the pack and how everyone’s doing well in school so far this year and how he’s been trying to come up with a better system for training the wolves to coordinate their attacks during combat. Stiles comes up with three more obstacles to add to the obstacle course that might help with that, and also somehow gets talking about his classes at school and the movie he saw with Lydia and Allison last week and how he thinks Isaac should think about going to culinary school because the donuts he made and brought to school were amazing. Derek puts too much ketchup on his fries, and Stiles steals some anyway, and then they finally get to talking about Deaton.

Stiles freaks out a little about his dreams, and maybe being connected to something that’s killing people, and how he doesn’t know enough to stop it, and Derek says, “I could watch his house for a while. Or follow him, see what happens.” And Stiles shrugs, but the idea does make him feel better, and he knows Derek can tell. 

 

 

Which is probably why, two weeks later, Derek is the one who finds the body.

Stiles is at Danny’s Finals-Are-Over-Now-It’s-Christmas party when he gets Derek’s text. Danny throws this party every year, and he invites everyone he knows and a lot of people he doesn‘t. They all show up, because everyone loves Danny, and the house is crowded and noisy and smells like sweet alcohol and gingerbread cookies and sweat. There’s a guy Stiles has talked to a few times in Danny-adjacent conversations-- a sophomore, his name is Mark, he’s a member of the GSA, and he’s rocking his nerd-hot chubby aesthetic tonight-- making small talk in the corner with Leah Chen, and Stiles is contemplating wandering over, maybe complimenting Mark on his Lumpy Space Princess t-shirt, because sex is fun and Mark is totally Stiles’ speed. 

He could use something to distract himself, because he’s made zero progress in figuring out what’s going on with the supernatural ether in spite of having the dream where Deaton dies every single night since he broke into Deaton’s house. Twice now he’s talked himself into going to talk to Deaton, only to chicken out when face to face with the guy due to skin-crawlingly awful vibes. Deaton-- or the hell beast possessing Deaton, and isn‘t that fantastic thought-- almost certainly knows there’s something up, but Stiles doesn’t know what to do about any of it, and he‘s run out of ideas for how to get more facts to work with. Trading hand jobs in Danny’s sister’s bedroom won’t make any of his problems go away, but it’ll make him feel better about his life. Probably. 

On the other hand, Leah is standing right there, and since the dance things have been weird with Michelle. They‘re not dating. They’ve texted a few times, and he even managed to take her out on a totally cliché movie and milkshakes date one Friday night, but the whole time Stiles was thinking about how he’s the kind of guy who, every night, dreams about dead people before they die, and she’s the kind of girl who worries about whether she has enough extracurriculars to put on her college applications or if she should do some more volunteering at a soup kitchen or something. And then the next time she asked him out was the day of the full moon and he made some stupid excuse, and it all comes down to the fact that Michelle is pretty and fun, but she doesn’t know and that means that spending time with her is like traveling to another country, to another planet, and maybe that ignorance is a place that he remembers often and fondly but that doesn’t mean he can live there ever again.

Stiles spent a weekend complaining about it to Scott, but that was half revenge for all the times Scott has made him listen to his Allison drama, and half real true angst about the revelation that it might actually be impossible for him to date someone who isn’t in the know about werewolves, and that lowers his possible dating pool to, like, Isaac, which, no. Not happening. He can’t actually even imagine, like, going steady with a girl like Michelle, it just seems so impossible it doesn’t even make sense to think about, and even though he would like to have sex with her again he’s not even all that sad about losing her in particular. There’s always casual hookups, after all. But Leah is Michelle’s best friend and maybe it’s too soon to hit on someone else right in front of her. 

Maybe luckily, maybe not, he’s spared having to make the decision when his pocket buzzes. 

  
_Deaton is dead_ , Derek’s text says, and Stiles wastes five minutes freaking out and looking for a quiet room before he gives up and goes out into the freezing night to call him.

“What happened?” he demands as soon as Derek picks up.

“I was following Deaton home from work and I lost him. It was like his scent trail just disappeared.” Derek sounds frustrated and angry. “So I started spiraling to pick him up again, and I found his body in the middle of the Preserve, looking like he‘d been dead all day.”

“That makes no sense,” Stiles says, shivering.

“No shit,” Derek says. “Get the others and meet me out here.” He hangs up before Stiles can snap out a witty comeback.

It takes twenty minutes to find all the wolves in the din of the party, but by the time Stiles finds Boyd in one of the upstairs bedrooms and peels him away from Amy-- who doesn’t even look mad about Boyd ditching her, how the hell does Boyd do that without explaining that he’s a werewolf?-- Lydia has called Allison, let Danny know what’s going on, wrangled the rest of the wolves into the back of Allison’s SUV, and gotten Stiles’ Jeep out of the tangle of parked cars in Danny‘s driveway.

The directions Derek texts him turn out to be to a point on the road where they pull both cars onto the shoulder and get out to follow Derek’s trail into the trees. There’s no snow, but mostly because it’s been so dry-- it’s almost cold enough, and the wind and the dark and the goddamn tree branches that keep hitting him in the face make searching for Derek a miserable experience even if Isaac, who takes the lead, seems to know exactly where to go. They walk for about twenty minutes into a hilly section of the woods, strung out in a bedraggled line, and Stiles manages to trip and fall on his face twice, the second time cutting open the palm of his hand where he catches himself on a jagged rock, before they find Derek. He’s under a small stony overhang, crouched down on the ground over something that at first Stiles thinks is a jumble of stones and brush, all lumpy shadow. Then he gets closer and realizes that it’s Deaton‘s corpse.

There’s no moon, but Lydia has a professional hunter grade Maglite, with a red-light filter so it doesn’t ruin anyone’s night vision, and even in the evil red glow Deaton’s skin looks unnaturally pale, washed out and fragile, his lips like gray tissue paper. Stiles can feel his heart rushing like he’s fallen into the frozen nightmare while awake. 

He can hear the wolves fanning out to look, or smell, for clues, and Allison starts patting down Deaton’s body while Lydia holds the flashlight for her, but all Stiles can do is stand there and hope they’re not screwing up this crime scene in a way that’s going to get every single one of them arrested. His head is spinning with _this is my fault_ and _how could I see this coming and still not stop it_ and _oh god I should have talked to him_ and _what the fuck happened_ , and then his head is spinning for real and, weirdly, he gets an intense rush of smell: cold forest and prosaic deodorant and _Derek_ , as Derek catches him before he hits the ground. 

It takes him a minute to figure out that he’s not actually having an inappropriate and embarrassing fainting fit. He finally clues in when he forces himself to pull away from Derek’s chest-- and when did that start being something he had to force himself to do? Fuck -- and staggers away from Deaton’s body to let himself calm down, and the feeling recedes like water swirling around the drain of a tub when the plug is pulled. He moves in closer again and suddenly he’s having a Sensurround flashback to his nightmare, only this time it’s just the room, no Deaton. He sees the cinderblock walls and feels the brush of cobweb on his skin, he hears a nonsensical echoing roar and smells the ice creeping up his veins toward his heart, and, fuck his life, he’s having a really unhelpful vision. 

The realization helps a little, gives him a way to distance himself from what he’s feeling, and he lets himself just experience whatever it is, lets it wash over and through him and ebb away again so he can think about it. When reality filters back in, he’s sprawled on his butt in the freezing dirt, Derek’s warm hands on his shoulders the only thing keeping him sitting upright, and the only thing he can think is _Deaton’s last moments didn’t include this many fucking trees_.

“Stiles? Are you OK?” That’s Derek, sounding worried and also irritated, like he’s surprised by the worry and resents Stiles for it, which, actually, is probably exactly what he’s feeling. That shouldn’t make Stiles feel like he’s accomplished some kind of feat, but it does. Briefly.

“Was his body moved here? Can you smell anyone else in this spot?” Stiles’ thoughts are tumbling over themselves, getting ahead of his facts. He just needs some facts so he can be sure he’s making sense.

“No,” Derek says. “Just Deaton.” 

“So it smells like he got here under his own power, but he didn’t, he was definitely killed inside.” Stiles is sure, now, that that’s what he saw. What he doesn’t know is what it _means_.

“His body is in the same condition as the first one,” Derek says doubtfully. “Exposure.”

“What if someone had him in a car and just tipped him out the door and drove off? You wouldn’t necessarily smell the people in the car, right? Just him.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Derek says, which, OK, so they’re in the middle of the woods, nobody drove a car out here, but that’s not really what Stiles was asking. He’s just trying to understand the parameters of what Derek is sensing, since he can’t smell it himself, and why can’t Derek just answer him? 

“No really, if someone did that, would it smell like it does here?” He’s ready to pursue this line of questioning until Derek answers out of irritation, but it doesn’t take as long as he expects it to.

“I’d smell the car,” Derek says. “And his body would smell like whoever’d had their hands on him. And he would look dumped, not like he lay down under his own power. And there would be tire tracks. And-”

“OK, OK, I get the picture.” Stiles holds up his hand to stop him. 

“Why are you so sure he was killed inside?” Derek asks. “This looks _exactly_ like Wright. Exposure.”

“I just know, OK?” Stiles isn’t sure how to explain his conviction, but he trusts it. Maybe he shouldn’t, but he does. “I saw the room again. From my nightmare. Just now. That was some kind of creepy psychic vision I just had, in case that wasn‘t obvious. Which I‘m sure it wasn‘t, it is dark after all.”

Derek just grunts in that annoying way he started after he settled down as alpha enough that he stopped yelling all the time. This particular grunt means _I heard what you said and I’m going to do whatever I want anyway_ , and it is Stiles’ least favorite, but he can‘t do anything about it at the moment. 

Stiles stands staring at Deaton’s body, thinking, while Derek moves away from him, gets reports back from the wolves-- nothing to be learned from the surrounding area, which Derek probably already knew since he was out here first-- and starts talking to Allison about moving Deaton’s body closer to civilization to jumpstart the investigation, maybe near the jogging trail so someone will see it and call in the cops first thing in the morning. There’s a hard lump of grief sitting in his stomach, and he’s really going to miss the cryptic bastard when he lets himself feel it, but for now he needs to focus. There’s something he’s not getting, he can feel it like a word on the tip of his tongue. The facts he has are pretty bare, but he knows if could just put them together in the right way, he’d be able to see…

But then he’s being drafted for advice on what kind of procedures to expect from the Sheriff’s department when a body is discovered in the woods, and whatever thought had been almost in his reach slips away again.

 

 

It’s almost four in the morning when Stiles makes it back home, which is several hours later than he’d been planning on staying out for Danny’s party, but, hey, there’s no school tomorrow so fuck it. His dad is home, for once, but as soon as someone discovers Deaton’s body next to the jogging trail he’s going to get called in to the scene, so Stiles shuts the front door as quietly as possible so his dad can get a few more hours of sleep before this mess lands in his lap. Stiles feels bad about that, about tossing his dad a body that‘s going to turn into yet another cold case or doesn‘t-feel-accidental accident, but he‘s told himself for a long time now that the alternative is putting his dad in the kind of danger he doesn‘t know how to fight. Covering up a crime scene doesn‘t feel like love, but he looks in the bathroom mirror and insists that it is, that it‘s more than a selfish desire to keep his dad thinking of him as a normal teenager, thinking that the worst thing he‘s done is play pranks on his schoolmates and lie about why he‘s out so late at night. Thinking he‘s not the kind of person who would knowingly let a good man meet his death without doing a thing to stop it. The mirror doesn’t answer back, doesn’t make him feel better, of course, just shows how fucking exhausted he looks, reveals the smear of dirt and possibly blood on his forehead. He didn’t think anyone was bleeding tonight, but he’s never surprised by blood anymore. 

There’s no point in whining about it until there’s someone to whine to, so he just sighs, and takes a shower. About halfway through, it at all hits him at once: the guilt, the grief and the overwhelming helplessness. He’s too tired to cry but he does just stand there motionless under the spray for about five minutes, staring at the tile and trying to stay afloat on this sea of sucking awfulness. 

When he stumbles into his bedroom, shirtless but with flannel pajama pants hanging low on his hips, still toweling off his hair, he almost shouts, because Deaton is standing by the window. There is so much wrong with this, starting with the fact that fucking Deaton does not break in his fucking window, that is a creeperwolf only zone, thanks very much, and ending with the fact that Deaton is _dead_ , he knows Deaton is dead, he had his very own hands on Deaton’s fucking corpse not an hour ago. His body doesn’t know what to do with itself, he just kind of chokes on his startlement, and jitters sideways, and drops his towel. 

His confusion lasts for all of half a second, though, before his body kicks into gear. He’s trained for this for months now, and he’s all reflex, diving for the space between his bed and his nightstand where he keeps his machete. 

The machete is one of his better ideas, if he says so himself. He bought it off Etsy, which makes it sound handmade in all the worst ways, but it’s the opposite of flimsy and flawed. The blacksmith he found only has an Etsy shop for long-range custom orders. She also has her own business, in Maine, where she crafts beautiful custom weapons and tools of all kinds, and when Stiles mailed her the mountain ash and pure iron to inlay along the stainless steel blade and told her he was a serious business cosplayer who needed something made to _very exact_ directions she didn’t bat an eye. He got 18 inches of razor sharp, high quality steel stamped with runes, with a handle wrapped in leather, in the mail six weeks later, and it only cost him his entire summer’s wages. Missing every summer night out at the movies to save up the money was totally worth it, because he’s perfected his process for infusing oil with wolfsbane, and with the oil on the blade and the magic-disrupting properties of iron and mountain ash, this knife will kill anything he’s ever fought against, from alpha werewolves to kanimas to puny humans. Assuming he can stick it in the right spot, of course. 

He slides his way to the bed like he‘s stealing second base, almost collides with the lamp on the bedside table, but he gets his fingers around the handle and bounces back up. He holds the blade in front of him, trying to slow his breathing and center himself, not let himself scatter to pieces, but he doesn’t attack right away. His reflexes know he’s in danger, but he can’t let himself attack without knowing for sure that this isn’t Deaton somehow come back to life, and not in the evil way like Peter. It could happen, turns out the world is just wild enough that resurrection is a real possibility he has to consider, and he can’t kill Deaton again until he’s sure he must.

The hesitation is a mistake. This isn’t Deaton, he can tell as soon as the thing moves, because Deaton never moves-- moved-- so abruptly, like a spider or a praying mantis, something insectly alien. There’s a blur, and then the thing has its hands around his neck, and he can see in the light from the streetlight that falls in through the window that the thing’s face is melting, shifting, like wax too close to a flame, and the fingers on his neck are dry and cool and hard like metal, not flesh. He can feel the prickle of claws against the skin right under his chin, and then he’s swinging his elbow out and chopping as hard as he can into the thing’s side.

The angle doesn’t give him a lot of leverage, but the creature jerks, and when he swings the machete up again he can see dark black blood on the blade. The hands on his neck don’t loosen, though, so he swings again, aiming for the kidneys, then when that has no effect, the backs of the legs, hoping that maybe he can hamstring the creature if he can’t kill it.

The grip on his neck adjusts, chokes him more precisely, and the creature’s face solidifies into something that is definitely not Deaton: its pale skin almost glows in the dimness, and its eyes are multifaceted, silvery, much too large. Its facial features are inhumanly elegant and pointed, frightening like the elves in his illustrated version of the ballad of Tam Lin. 

He can feel the creature’s fingers probing the back of his neck, and the cool, clear focus of combat gives him time to think, _Last chance, better make it good_ , before he’s twisting aside, drawing back and sinking his knife as deep as he can into the thing’s chest. Not-Deaton shudders, and Stiles has a brief flash of hope that he’s killed it, that he’s won somehow, and then there’s a very sharp pain that shoots down his spine from the top of his neck all the way down to his feet, and he can feel his muscles going loose and useless, the machete falling from his hand before he blacks out.

 

 

Stiles is underwater. There is cold seaweed clinging to his legs, pulling at him with slimy fingers, dragging him down down--

The tide is in his muscles and veins, his mind is an ice floe breaking apart and drifting away, bit by bit by--

The cold is in his bones now, he can feel his skeleton, the core of him, turning blue brittle solid like the absence of heat, like a black hole, and there’s a gravity horizon tearing him into pieces--

 

 

When he wakes up, finally, he doesn’t know he’s awake. The nightmare is all around him, vivid and immediate, cold concrete and invisible bindings pinning his limbs together and anchoring him to the floor. He’s still wearing nothing but his flannel pajama pants and he’s _freezing_ , past the point of shivering, past the point of pain. There’s blood trickling down the palm of his hand where he cut it open when he fell in the woods, and the tickle of it is what finally clues him in that this is real, the nightmare has him for real this time--

Except he’s dreaming, too, he sees his father eating breakfast, he sees himself putting his notebook in his backpack and texting Scott like nothing’s happened to him. It goes on like that, surreal dream world glimpses of a typical day in the life of Stiles, like he’s split in two, one half dreaming his real life, the other half stuck wide awake in the numb nightmare world where the only thing that changes is the location of the tiny square of light that he can see on the floor out of the corner of his eye.

He doesn’t know how long it takes him to put the pieces together, maybe an hour, maybe a day. Maybe longer. His brain is maxed out on terror, the only thing he’s feeling is numb, and that makes it difficult to maintain the motivation it takes to push his thoughts forward. He’s stupid and clumsy and he keeps losing time, he blinks and the real-life half of himself jumps from one location to the next, so it takes him a while to figure out that not-Deaton has become not-Stiles and is taking over his life while it keeps him half-conscious and trapped here. 

The cut on his hand keeps bleeding, it won’t clot, and he’s not sure why. It makes him angry-- the tickle is so fucking annoying-- but that’s a good thing. The anger is warm when nothing else is, and it shifts his brain into gear trying to find a way to swipe at the blood. He can’t move his limbs, can’t turn his head to look around, but he can open and close his eyes, and he can twitch his fingertips, and he thinks if he could just move his thumb he could poke at the cut, and that’s all it would take to make the slow leak of blood stop tickling. 

  
_Aflaesa_ , he whispers in his head. _Aflaesa_. He repeats it over and over until it loses all meaning, until he’s half awake and he’s not even sure he’s remembering the unbinding spell correctly, it’s just syllables he repeats while he strains to move his thumb. When he feels the brush of thumb on his palm, it surprises him to momentary alertness. His thumb is covered in blood, now, and the cut hurts instead of tickling, which is a novel feeling so he’s glad about it. He loses time again, and then he realizes: _he has blood on his thumb_. 

Hope kicks him in the chest, and now he can feel himself draining away, his spark being sucked out of him through whatever connection not-Deaton settled into his spine when it got its claws in him, but he can also feel himself breathing. It’s a slow process from there, but he traces out the letters on his bloody palm, messy and overlapping and unreadable, but it works. It works better than it should, all the rules of magic say this isn’t how you do things, but he believes and he bleeds and slowly slowly he regains motion, first in his fingers, then his hands, his arms, and finally he’s peeling his back off the concrete floor and sitting up.

The connection with the thing that attacked him reverberates at the movement, and he can feel its alarm. There’s a surge, and then his magic, his self, is being pulled out of him at a much faster rate. Stiles has never bled to death, never felt his veins emptying onto the ground, but he’s pretty sure it feels like this, like going dry and hollow and empty, like something precious is being siphoned out of you. The cut on his palm is dry now, he squeezes at it but can’t get more than a dry smear of blood on his finger, and that’s not enough, so he sets his teeth in his fingernail and rips at it until he has a jagged, painful edge, and then he starts scratching gouges in his stomach as deep as he can get them.

At least he can see what he’s doing now, and the Pass-Through is short, but this will never be his favorite way to work magic. It fucking sucks, in fact. This isn’t even what the Pass-Through is meant to do, it’s supposed to be specific to warding magic, but he’s certain he remembers it accurately, and he hopes, because of the effect it had on the pack bond, that it’ll help now. 

He has to dig his nail ruthlessly into his skin in order to form all the letters, but he’s so cold it barely hurts, and while it doesn’t break the link it does clog the outflow of his magic significantly. For better or worse, it also cuts off the echoing perceptions he was getting from his doppelganger, and now he can’t see or hear what it’s doing at all. 

Hopefully that means it can’t sense him anymore, either. His knees are weak, and he’s still so cold and numb that his feet feel like they don’t belong to him, like he’s trying to walk on uneven lumps of clay. The room isn’t as impressive as it seemed when he was dreaming it, which is lucky, because he doesn’t even have shoes, and he doesn’t know where the fuck he is, and there’s still a pretty good chance that he’s dying of hypothermia right this minute, and he probably doesn’t have the strength to break down a door with his bare feet. 

Breaking down doors isn’t necessary, though, or picking locks with his blunt fingers either, just walking to the perfectly ordinary door set in the wall he could never see in the dream and turning the handle. He stumbles out into murky darkness-- before sunrise or after sunset, he can’t tell-- and is surprised to see streetlights lighting up a perfectly ordinary, vaguely familiar neighborhood that, if he remembers correctly, is on the outskirts of Beacon Hills on the side of town opposite the Hale house. There’s no one around outside, no joggers or people taking out the trash or even anyone driving by, which makes him think it’s probably very early morning-- or maybe he‘s still dreaming. He feels like he might still be dreaming. 

Stiles starts walking, glad he can’t feel his feet because if he could walking on December-cold concrete in bare feet would certainly be excruciating, and he doesn’t know if it’s the cold or if he’s in shock or if it’s some side-effect of the spell that’s eating him up but he doesn’t feel even a drop of surprise when Derek’s Camaro comes squealing around the corner and Derek comes tumbling out of it.

He blinks, and then he’s in the car, Derek’s leather jacket around his shoulders, the heat going full blast, and Derek is saying-- shouting, almost-- “Fuck, Stiles, what happened to you? What are you doing out here? What fucking happened?” 

Stiles has never heard Derek so caught up in an emotion that wasn’t anger-- although there is some anger there, maybe more than a little, so he shouldn’t be so surprised. Most of what he’s hearing is other emotions, though: worry, maybe even fear, surprise, confusion, and a dark undercurrent of something else he can‘t identify. So he flops his hand down on Derek’s knee, uncoordinated, and hopes he sounds comforting enough to make up for how wrecked he knows he looks right now, half naked and covered in bloody scratches. Talking is harder than he expects it to be. “’S OK, Der. Derek.” It takes his mouth several syllables to adjust; he sounds drunk. “I know what it is, we can kill it. Like we do. ‘S gonna be fine.”

Derek’s phone goes off before he can do more than growl in response, and Stiles closes his eyes, tilts his head back against the seat, and lets himself drift. He catches bits and pieces of the conversation. 

“-- careful, Scott --”

“-- _not Stiles_ \--”

“-- ten minutes, just hold on --”

The car swerves around a tight corner and Stiles comes back to himself, realizes Derek is no longer on the phone. The hot air blowing out of the vents makes his skin prickle and burn, it scorches his lungs, but when he starts to thrash his way out of the jacket Derek growls at him and reaches a too-hot hand over to hold the jacket closed on his chest. 

“You’re fucking dying of hypothermia, Stiles. Keep the fucking jacket on until I get you inside.”

There’s something he needs to do before he lets anyone manhandle him, though. It’s a struggle to remember, a struggle to get his mouth working again. “Gotta,” he starts.  “Gotta go to my house. Bestiary. Is at my house.” 

“What.” Derek sounds really pissed, but Stiles can’t get his eyes open again to see his face. “No. Whatever it is, we can kill it in a few hours, when you‘re not fucking _dying_.” 

“ ‘S not hypothermia. It’s a spell. Gotta kill the polpegan.” Stiles is beyond exhausted, he’s floating. Derek curses and pulls a U-turn, and Stiles lets himself relax because that means Derek isn’t arguing with him anymore. 

 

 

Derek shakes him awake-- they’re parked in the driveway of Stiles’ house. His dad‘s patrol car is in the driveway, and it occurs to him that the shifter might be here, might be impersonating him, sleeping in his bed, in the same house where his dad sleeps. The thought makes him _furious_ , and he makes it out of the car and up the steps on his own power. He doesn‘t have his keys, but before he can even pat at his pockets ineffectually Derek produces a key ring and unlocks Stiles‘ front door, and that is weird enough to make him pause in spite of everything. 

“What the fuck, dude?” is what he means to say, but it comes out as “-- th’ fuck?”

Derek glares at him, says “I have keys for everyone in the pack, I’m the alpha.” and they are so having a conversation about that later, but now is not the time. 

Derek goes up the stairs in front of him, already shifted into his beta form, and Stiles figures he’s not the only one wondering where not-Stiles is right now. He crosses his fingers that his dad doesn’t wake up, and follows after without argument. He’s too tired to think of an appropriately witty remark, anyway.

His bedroom is empty, and he spares a moment to be glad that tonight is not the night that his dad gets woken up by supernatural beings fighting in his bedroom, before he practically falls into his desk chair and flips open his laptop. His movements are gaining, well, not grace, but the more he moves the less wobbly he feels, which is nice. The Pass-Through might have something to do with the way he can sit upright without feeling like he’s dying of exhaustion, and he‘s starting to shiver these deep, bone-shaking shivers that, from what he remembers about the symptoms of hypothermia, are a good sign. The Bestiary is already open on his computer and it only takes him a minute to find the entry he’s been half-remembering since he saw the creature’s true face.

Derek leans over his shoulder, and Stiles can feel the press of his chest like a furnace against him. Unlike the painfully hot air in the car, this heat is something he craves, and he has to hold himself still so he doesn’t plaster himself to Derek’s chest. _You could claim disorientation later_ , a small voice says in the back of his head, and he quashes it ruthlessly. 

“So that’s what we’re dealing with?” Derek asks. 

“Yep, that‘s the one.” Stiles is tired enough that he doesn’t explain further, just closes his eyes and lets Derek read the entry. He knows what it says already: unlike werewolves, who are primarily human for all their supernatural traits, polpegan are a kind of pooka, which in turn are a subset of faerie, which means that while they’re shape shifters, they were never human. They can perfectly impersonate any human, or non-human animals if the mood strikes them, but their usual prey, and the only thing they really eat, is magicians.

“They eat magic,” Stiles says. The Bestiary doesn’t explain that as well as Stiles can, now that he’s seen it firsthand. “I mean, it kills the magic user. But what they actually eat is magic, and they suck it out of people via some kind of tether. Like the one between the kanima and its master, only a lot more, you know, sucky. And incapacitating. And I‘m pretty sure it was getting information out of it, too, the better to impersonate me with.”

“Stiles,” Derek says. “When did it grab you.”

“Right after we moved Deaton’s body,” Stiles says. “I don’t know-- how long has it been?”

“Five days,” Derek says tightly, and Stiles can hear him blaming himself for not rescuing Stiles immediately, like he always blames himself for anything bad that happens to any of them, so he moves to nip Derek’s guilt in the bud. 

“That’s not so bad,” he says, and laughs, because it really isn’t, not compared to the way Deaton’s corpse looked in the light of a single flashlight. “I’m kind of impressed with myself, you know, I’m like Steve fucking McQueen or something.”

“How do we kill it?” Derek asks, and, yeah, that would be a good thing to know. Stiles can’t wait to sleep for a month so he can get his brain back.

“Uh…” He bites at his ragged fingernail while he scrolls through the supplemental information he cribbed from the library of hunting books in Allison‘s basement when he was updating the Bestiary with the info off Peter‘s laptop. “Iron knife, you have to cut its heart out of its chest and… Oh, gross. No way is anyone eating that thing’s heart. There’s got to be another… good, we can just burn it on a mountain ash pyre. That sounds much more sanitary. Good thing hunters are so prissy.”

Derek grunts, and Stiles doesn’t know whether he’s agreeing that hunters are prissy or just sad he doesn’t have an excuse to literally eat the heart of his enemy. He directs Derek to the box under his bed, ignores the raised eyebrow when Derek sees all the gay porn DVDs that make up his excellent dad-repellent, and retrieves a small iron knife, along with his 9mm, and its shoulder holster. He sorts through his pre-loaded clips of bullets, because while the Bestiary specified a blade, he’s hoping the iron inlaid bullets will at least make an impression. They probably won’t kill the polpegan, but he rather likes the idea of shooting it in the face, and anyway he doesn‘t see his machete anywhere. He‘s going to be pissed if not-Stiles got rid of it. 

They’re downstairs again before Stiles realizes the massive flaw in their plan. “We don’t know where it is. Do we? You never mentioned what my evil twin has been up to while I was freezing to death on its basement floor.”

Derek shakes his head, keeps walking into the kitchen, to the fridge. “The betas are out searching for it. Well, for you. I told them you texted me for help but not where you were, so. If it still looks like you, they should be able to find it.”

Stiles cocks his head. “Did you know? That it wasn’t me? Could you, like, smell that it wasn‘t human?”

Derek keeps his back turned, sticks a mug of milk in the microwave. “I wasn’t sure,” he says, and Stiles is surprised. Getting Derek to admit when he’s wrong about something is like pulling teeth, but getting him to admit when he’s uncertain is even harder.

“But you suspected,” Stiles says. 

Derek shrugs, and when the microwave beeps he shoves the mug at Stiles. “Drink this. You’re still way too close to hypothermic shock.”

“That isn’t an answer,” Stiles says, but he takes the milk obediently. The mug is warm on his fingers, on the verge of painful but still good, and he really just wants to curl up under about a dozen blankets and sleep. Maybe with Derek under the blankets with him, to keep him warm.

Derek won’t meet his eyes, and Stiles is starting to get suspicious. His glimpses of what the polpegan was doing through the psychic connection hadn’t shown him anything strange but Derek is acting weird about something. All Derek says, though, is, “I felt it when you cut yourself out of the pack again, like the spell you did to break into Deaton’s house. I went to the last location I felt you at.”

“I didn’t know you could do that,” Stiles says, thoughtful.

“I didn’t either.”

Any further questions will have to wait, because Derek’s phone lights up. Derek turns the screen so Stiles can see a text from Isaac: _Found Stiles. At the Hale house. Everything is cool_.

Derek is texting something back, possibly along the lines of _Wait there, I’m coming to you_ , when Stiles feels it. The connection to the polpegan _wrenches_ like the polpegan is prying it open with a crowbar made of ice and white and it _hurts_ , and then the Pass-Through scratched into his skin flares with a stabbing, frost-blue pain and disappears completely. The scratches on his stomach have spontaneously healed, but the downside is that his magic is being pulled out of him again like a flood, and there‘s something else, too, like a mess of red hot wires that extends outside his body is being pulled in one side of him and out the other, in every direction. He’s being turned inside out through every pore of his skin. He gasps out, “We need to hurry,” and then Derek is half-carrying him out the door toward the car. 

Whatever coherency he gained in his house has disappeared completely, and he loses snatches of the drive. He’s overhearing-- overseeing-- glimpses from the polpegan again: he can see the silhouette of the Hale house against the night sky, and white moonlight casting sharp shadows on the trees, and Isaac’s pale, unconscious face. 

The view through the polpegan’s eyes blurs together with the view out the car window, and when they pull up into the clearing in front of the house and Stiles stumbles out of the car, the split vision is constant and disorienting. He can see the polpegan, still wearing his face, crouched over Isaac’s limp body, the four claws of its right hand sunk into the back of his neck, and at the same time he can see himself closing the Camaro’s door, Derek walking around the car to grab onto his arm and hold him steady.

Stiles isn’t sure what Derek is feeling through the pack bond, but he’s pretty sure the polpegan is using Isaac to force the connection wide open. He can almost see the web of magic that binds them all together: the polpegan to him, the polpegan to Isaac, him to Isaac and Derek, Derek to Isaac, Derek to him. And then there’s more, he can feel the rest of the pack creeping in towards the house through the woods. He’s never been able to feel them before, not like this, not without even seeing them, and he can’t tell if this new sense is something that he’s eavesdropping on from the polpegan or if maybe his magic is flaring up in new and unexpected ways because he’s dying. Whatever the cause, he can see that one effect is that the polpegan has somehow got its hooks into the whole pack bond, and is draining the wolves through him. They’re at one remove, so it doesn’t affect them the same-- Stiles isn’t sure if they can even feel it-- but he can see the lines of connection bending and shifting, like branches of a river carving new riverbeds during a flood, and he knows that even if he dies, as long as the polpegan lives the rest of the pack will be in danger.

He doesn’t want to be dying, but he can feel the aching emptiness in his bones that says he’s going to unless he does something about it, and then Derek howls that angry alpha howl that drops below the register that human ears can hear and takes the iron knife out of his pocket. He stalks forward, slow and deliberate like he’s just going to walk up to the polpegan and stab it in the chest, but when he’s still several yards away, the polpegan releases Isaac and disappears. 

No-- it’s not gone, it’s moving faster than Stiles can see, and now it’s on Derek and it doesn’t look anything like Stiles anymore-- which is nice, he doesn’t really want the nightmares that would undoubtedly come from seeing something that looks exactly like himself get shredded-- and it’s tearing into Derek’s arms and chest and face, and then the rest of the wolves are howling and running and jumping into the fight. Stiles stays where he is, maybe fifteen feet away from the epicenter of fur and blood and shrieking, and it’s only half because he has his handgun out and he needs a vantage for a clear shot. He’s also not sure how capable he is of walking right now, the ground is looking pretty inviting, and he sinks to one knee, braces himself against the dirt, but he keeps the gun up. Bullets might not kill the polpegan, but they probably won’t do it any favors, either. 

It’s hard to tell who’s winning. The melee is all shadow and flashes of teeth and Stiles‘ head is full of pain and claws and quick dark shapes, but he thinks it’s probably a bad sign that the polpegan hasn’t gone down immediately. Four angry, territorial werewolves should be able to take down one of almost anything pretty swiftly, but they haven’t yet, and that makes Stiles deeply unhappy. He’s starting to fuzz around the edges, he’s watching everything through the gun sights but he’s still losing track--

He sees a dark shape thrown from the fray, focuses-- it’s Boyd, Stiles can see the shape of his shoulders and the gleam of his dark skin, and he’s not dead, he’s groaning, but his legs don‘t seem to be working because he isn’t pulling himself up from the ground--

And then another shadow, thrown in Stiles’ direction, over his head. He whips his head around and he can see Scott hit a tree trunk and slide to the bottom, motionless, and he has never coveted werewolf senses more than he does in this moment. He can’t get his body to move him to where Scott is lying so so still, and if he could just hear Scott’s heartbeat he’d be able to breathe again--

There’s a shape crumpling to the ground, and if the two still fighting are the polpegan and Derek that must be Rachel. She’s not moving at all and the soft breeze is bringing the hot smell of blood and guts to his nose and he can’t lose his shit right now, the fight isn’t over, he can‘t--

The polpegan doesn’t move like Derek does, it moves like a robot or an ant, something so far from human there can be no real communication with it. It is fast and hard and it doesn’t reel back from blows that would crush a human or even a werewolf. Blood is black in the light of the waxing moon, but not so dark that it doesn’t glisten on the polpegan’s white skin, on Derek’s claws and mouth. But then the polpegan moves in a blur, like a videotape on fast forward, except Derek is stuck at normal speed and he’s falling to the ground and not getting up. 

Stiles steadies his breathing, relaxes his shoulders so the gun in his hand doesn’t shake even a little. He doesn’t blink, but the polpegan stutters forward-- suddenly it’s right in front of him and reaching out for his neck like it did in his bedroom, like it did to Isaac. It’s convenient that it’s so close, he thinks, calm like still water, because his eyes are going blurry but he still doesn’t have to try very hard to shoot it five times in the chest, and if he doesn‘t get as tight a cluster as he might on a good day at the range, at least every shot hits center mass.

The creature must have seen the gun in his hand, so it doesn’t make sense for it to be startled at the bullets in its body, but it acts like it is, it stops, and looks down, and he can’t read the expression in those fae, glittering eyes, but he wonders if it might be puzzled. _Weren’t expecting iron, you bastard?_ he thinks. And then he sees Derek looming up behind it. Derek’s jaws close on its neck, and his clawed hand comes bursting through the polpegan’s ribcage from the back, holding it still from the inside out, and his other hand is coming around and carving the thing’s heart out with Stiles’ little iron knife.

 

 

That’s the last thing Stiles remembers for a little while. He’s not sure how long he’s out: when he opens his eyes again, it’s still middle-of-the-night dark but there’s a fire somewhere, flames flickering, and Allison’s SUV is parked by the house. Allison and two of her minions are unloading logs and building a pyre. When he turns his head, he sees Lydia standing watch over the shifter’s body, iron stakes pinning it to the ground just in case, and Isaac is sitting next to Rachel and Boyd and Scott, who are laying draped over each other. All four of them are bloody and complaining and totally and completely alive. 

He’s not worried about Derek, he remembers the flare of Derek’s eyes as he ripped out the polpegan’s heart so he knows that Derek is fine, but Stiles would still like to see him, so he knows where he is. He thinks about it for a slow minute, but doesn’t realize until he feels a hand ghost over his scalp, brush the curve of his ear, that he’s cradled in Derek’s lap, pressed against the heat of his chest. _Huh_ , he thinks, and then he passes out again. 

 

 

When he wakes up, there’s soft gray light lighting up his eyelids, he’s warmer than he remembers being possible, and the world is fuzzy and heavy and comforting. He feels like the day after being really sick, shaky and gross but also like there’s this fierce vital joy running through his veins, and he keeps his eyes closed as he stretches and lets himself wallow in the feeling. He’s in bed, obviously, but it isn’t until his stretching, wiggling foot kicks someone else’s foot that he realizes that he’s not alone. 

He really ought to have noticed earlier, because now it registers that to stretch he had to roll a little bit away from the pliable, human-shaped furnace at his back, and it’s probably not a good thing that his self-preservation instincts didn’t alert him right off to the fact that he’s in someone else’s bed. That seems like an important thing to be aware of. He doesn’t have the energy to freak out, though, or maybe his instincts are better than he gives himself credit for, because he opens his eyes and sees Derek and thinks, _well that’s alright_.

In spite of being kicked, Derek seems to be waking up more slowly than Stiles is, his face is still mushed into the pillow, but then he turns his face to the side, opens his eyes and blinks sleepily. He doesn’t seem surprised to see Stiles watching him sleep like a creeper. Whatever, Derek has creeped enough that it‘s totally fair for Stiles to stare at him as much as he wants, and he refuses to be embarrassed about it. 

“Good morning,” Derek says, like they’ve unexpectedly run into each other on the street, not woken up in bed with their legs still pressed warmly together from knee to hip.

Stiles huffs. “Good morning.” Then, sobering, “what the fuck happened? Everything after seeing your hand come through the polpegan’s chest is kind of hazy.”

Derek blinks once, slowly. “I’m not surprised. You-- I didn’t realize at first how badly off you were. You almost died of-- I don’t even know what to call it. Shock, maybe. Magic exhaustion.” He pauses. “That’s why you’re here. None of us knew how to help you, with Deaton gone. Lydia said we should treat your symptoms as best we could, which meant warming you up. So. Sorry if this is weird.” He doesn’t move his leg away, isn’t holding his body like he thinks this is weird at all.

Stiles laughs. “Weird is the story of my life, dude, I am the king of weird. Waking up in bed with an insanely hot werewolf doesn’t even register on the weirdometer.” Derek’s eyebrow quirks, and then he actually smiles when Stiles says, “Thanks for, you know, saving my life.” 

“You’re welcome.”

“So everyone’s OK? And the bad guy is dead and burned?”

Derek nods, his stubble scritching on the pillow. “Lydia mixed its ashes with mountain ash and iron filings and threw them in the river.”

“Remind me to never piss her off,” Stiles says, and he feels light as air, because his pack is the best kind of bloodthirsty and the thing that tried to kill him is dead.

He’s also trying really hard not to feel awkward lying in Derek‘s bed, but it is weird, in spite of all his deflection, because Derek is Derek, he‘s angry and forceful and alpha-y, not someone who has sleepovers. Maybe he should think about getting up. He’s weighing the pros and cons of getting out from under the blankets, maybe retreating to the bathroom, when his eyes flick back to Derek’s, and he can tell Derek is mulling over something, so he waits, patiently, for whatever words Derek needs to line up in some kind of order before he can push them out of his mouth.

“I didn’t know the polpegan wasn’t you, at first,” is what he says, and Stiles nods, because he doesn’t blame Derek-- no one knew, the polpegan was a perfect predator. Derek keeps going. “But two days after we found Deaton’s body, I hadn’t heard from you, so I went to your house. I thought maybe you would be having dreams again, about someone else. Whoever was next. Anyway.” He stops. Stiles is itching with curiosity by now. Derek has the air of someone about to confess a crime but he can’t think what Derek could possibly have done. He has to force himself to keep his mouth shut until Derek is ready to explain. 

“You kissed me. I mean, it kissed me. But I thought it was you.”

That… was not what Stiles was expecting to hear. He gapes. What’s the right response here? His first impulse is to apologize, but he’s not the one who did anything to apologize for, and anyway Derek doesn’t look angry. Sad, maybe, with a hint of something else-- that‘s not nervousness, is it? -- but not angry.

“I guess it wanted to distract me,” he says. “It worked. I didn’t realize… I didn’t know what to think.”

“You said you suspected,” Stiles says. He can’t figure out why Derek is telling him this, in this way, with their faces so close together on the pillows of Derek’s bed that he can feel Derek’s breath on his cheek. Maybe… but maybe not. “Before, you said you suspected that the polpegan wasn’t me.”

“You smelled like wet lighting,” Derek says, and Stiles remembers breaking into Deaton’s house, remembers smiling at Derek in the diner afterward and Derek smiling back at him. 

“You came to get me when I escaped,” he says. Maybe this is significant. He feels like it might be.

“Yeah,” Derek says, and then somehow their faces are even closer together and Stiles’ heart is going like a rollercoaster.

“Did you try to rip out not-me’s throat?” Stiles asks. It’s probably not the best way to ask what he’s trying to ask, but he can’t think right now.

“No.”

“So if I were to kiss you right now, you probably wouldn’t rip my throat out, either,” he says, and it’s not a question.

“Probably not,” Derek says, and he’s smiling, and then he’s leaning forward and _Oh_. Kissing Derek is not like hooking up with a stranger in a bar bathroom, not like kissing a pretty girl just because she’s pretty. Derek is stubbled jaw and calloused hands and muscles that curl and shift as he rolls toward Stiles, but he‘s also heat and power and _you-are-home, you-are-safe_. 

Derek presses a hand into Stiles’ chest, moves him onto his back, then scoots himself closer so he’s on his side, pressed up against Stiles’ side. If he leaned in just a fraction, he would be draped across Stiles’ body, but he holds himself back, like he’s not sure how bruised Stiles is feeling. If Stiles thought about it, the answer might come back _pretty bruised_ , but he isn’t feeling the pain. He’s feeling how careful Derek‘s being, how gentle he’s making himself be, and it doesn‘t make Stiles feel weak, it makes him feel precious, and it’s overwhelming. Derek kisses like a thunderstorm, like the tide, it washes over him and Stiles is swept out to sea. 

Derek’s holding himself up on one elbow at the perfect angle for kissing, and smoothing his other hand all along Stiles’ sides and chest and arms, wherever he can reach. Feelings crowd their way up Stiles’ throat and for once he lets them, lets himself close his eyes and curl his fingers around Derek’s jaw and do absolutely nothing but kiss him lazy and slow.

Stiles has been half aware this whole time that he’s naked, and Derek is too, but the fact is brought to the front of his attention when Derek’s hand follows the line of his ribs from his chest to his side, then continues down, across his hip, Derek’s fingers almost but not quite curling down to Stiles’ ass. Derek caresses his hipbone with his thumb, then folds himself down Stiles’ body like he’s about to get up close and personal with Stiles’ cock. Stiles holds his breath. And keeps holding it, because Derek just moves on past, fingers and now his mouth caressing and nibbling at Stiles’ thighs and the mole on the side of his knee and the line of aching muscle in Stiles’ calves. The look on Derek’s face is astounded, like Stiles is a work of art and he can’t believe no one’s yelling at him for getting his fingers all over every inch of him.

And then Derek uncurls himself and lays down again, so that their noses are touching, and he kisses Stiles like his mouth is a magnet he can’t stay away from for too long. Stiles’ leans up into it at first, but his muscles surprise him by starting to shake. He’s still so weak, wrung out, like a newborn, and when Derek presses him back down into the pillow with a concerned look on his face, he shrugs and says, “I‘ve been mostly dead all day.”

Derek frowns, and the tightness around his eyes says he’s not just annoyed at Stiles‘ obscure movie references. Stiles has known for a while that Derek would be sad if he died-- they’ve saved each other’s lives too many times for that not to be just a fact that he knows-- but seeing the echo of his brush with death painted on Derek’s face like that hurts him. He reaches up and rubs his thumb against Derek’s temple to smooth away the tension, and when Derek bends down to kiss him again the tenderness of it breaks his heart. That’s what this is, then-- he’s alive, unexpectedly, and this make out session is an overflow of relief, some urge in both of them to find the farthest thing from mortality. And maybe that thought aches a little in his chest because that’s not all he wants from Derek, but fuck whatever else he can’t have, he can have this, and he wants it. God, he wants it.

They keep kissing, and the intensity of it waxes and wanes, sometimes languid, sometimes more urgent. Stiles isn’t sure what he wants, what his exhausted body can handle, and after the nth time Derek pulls back from a too-intense kiss he starts to think that Derek isn’t certain either, maybe isn’t sure what he can have. That’s OK, he thinks. Maybe all they’re going to do is kiss like they‘re dreaming, and he’s OK with that, because it’s like he’s drunk or high or something, his brain is on another plane where all he can do is feel these sensations, and it‘s amazing. He lets his own hands, soft with fatigue, wander across Derek’s chest, skims his fingers up Derek’s sides. Derek is ticklish, he discovers, but only if you get a light touch in just the right spot just under his armpit. 

Derek bats his hand away without any force, and Stiles goes with it because he doesn’t have the energy for tickling. He stores the information away for later use-- or later angst, depending. This is Derek, and he still can’t quite believe this is happening at all, so if it turns out to be too good to be true it won’t surprise him. He pushes that thought away and works his fingers around Derek’s skull, starts with just brushing his fingertips through Derek’s hair, and then when he ‘mm’s and pushes into the touch, works his fingertips into Derek’s scalp with just a little bit of force. His hands wander down the back of Derek‘s neck to his shoulders, his fingers pressing into Derek’s warm skin and muscles, and he can feel Derek’s erection against his hip. 

Stiles isn’t strong enough to hold himself up, let alone manhandle Derek, but when he gets one hand on the middle of Derek’s back, right above his tattoo, and tugs at him, Derek cooperates. He ends up draped over Stiles’ chest, right where Stiles wanted him, and the hot press of his body, pushing Stiles down into the mattress, pinning him securely even though Derek is still holding a lot of his weight on his elbows, is one of the best things Stiles has ever felt. He can’t help but make a pleased little noise and smile into the kiss Derek is pressing into his lips. Derek pulls back a little and looks at him, his eyes dark and hot. Stiles can feel his heart picking up, and all of a sudden he doesn’t feel like smiling anymore. He can barely breathe and all he can think about is the solid weight of Derek‘s cock against the hollow of his hip, so close to where his own cock is red and throbbing against Derek‘s skin.

He kind of feels like he needs to hang on to something or he’s going to be swept away, so he lifts one hand up to Derek’s face and works his fingers back into Derek’s hair. Derek likes that, it seems, because when Stiles curls his fingers just hard enough to tug, Derek’s breath stutters, a short little inhale, and then he’s moving again, sliding down Stiles’ chest, pressing burning hot kisses into Stiles’ skin, and he’s not stopping. Time stops, and all Stiles can do is stare as Derek’s mouth trails down below his belly button, down down and his cock is right there, right next to Derek’s lips and tongue and Stiles is definitely dreaming still because Derek’s mouth is on his cock and Derek is making these little noises, almost too faint to hear, like he fucking loves it. 

Derek licks his way up one side of Stiles’ cock and down the other, one long slide, and then does it again, switches to short little licks that don’t seem in any way designed to get Stiles off, like Derek is just exploring, learning the territory. He keeps going like that, occasionally getting distracted and nibbling on Stiles hipbones, sucking very gently at the soft skin of his thigh, before going back to Stiles’ cock and running his lips over the head.

It’s a lot, it’s too much, and after several long minutes of teasing Stiles finds his words, starts talking to convince Derek to get on with it before he dies. “Oh my god. Is this real life?” He sounds like an idiot, but Derek smiles into the base of his cock and that’s the hottest-- “Fuck, you’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, Derek, how are you real? God yes- that’s- oh please, Derek, please. You’re so fucking sexy.”

The words pour out of him, half nonsense, but they must convince Derek that Stiles is about to loose it because he wraps one hand around the base of Stiles’ cock and grips his thigh with the other, harder than he has this whole time, and Stiles likes it, it makes him feel real and solid, like he’s tethered to the earth. Derek licks one long stripe up the underside of Stiles’ cock and then his whole mouth sinks down and it’s so hot and wet and perfect that Stiles feels like he might pass out. 

Derek’s hand is hot and tight at the base of Stiles’ cock, and he takes the first couple inches in his mouth, going slow and cautious, and at first Stiles thinks he’s still being a teasing asshole, but then it occurs to him that Derek’s not a pro at this. 

He remembers sitting on the hood of the Jeep out by the river. It was August, and the day had been hot as the fifth circle of hell, but the sun was down, it was twilight, and everyone was out of the river, lounging on various surfaces. Maybe they were talking about Scott and Allison‘s dating woes, or maybe it was Boyd they were teasing, Stiles doesn‘t remember, but he does remember Lydia making some sassy comment about how Derek should find a nice guy or girl to show him a good time and then maybe he wouldn’t be so uptight about his betas dating non-werewolves. 

“I don’t date,” Derek said flatly, and that was the end of that. Stiles thought at the time that Derek was just in a mood-- sourwolf is sour, situation normal-- but now he wonders.

He thought it was just him, that he was the one who was inexperienced, virginal, but maybe all his assumptions are wrong because Derek seems halfway to overwhelmed, he‘s fumbling and eager. There’s no reason for that to be so fucking hot, but it is, it makes him feel like Derek wants him specifically, not just someone to feel alive with, and even though that’s probably not true the feeling that rushes through his heart and lungs is almost pain. But it isn’t pain, it’s pleasure, and his breathing is going fast and short, his hands are twisted so tight in Derek’s hair, and he’s coming so hard he’s shaking.

His brain is blank and white and he can see Derek swallowing him down, inexpert but fucking wanting it. Come drips down Derek’s chin but he just swipes it back into his mouth with two fingers and then he’s looking up at Stiles. The grin that breaks over his face is so fucking genuine, he actually looks sweet. Fuck, he looks like a fucking angel, and Stiles can feel his heart breaking into a million pieces because whatever this is, he knows it‘s not what he wants it to be, not the start of some epic romance. That‘s not how his life works.

But fuck it, he’ll take what he can get, so when the orgasm rush fades a little he grabs Derek’s bicep and pulls him back up, kisses him soft and deep as he can. He gets his hand around Derek’s cock, and the angle is a little awkward, but maybe Derek was teasing himself as much as he was teasing Stiles because it doesn’t take long at all before he’s coming all over Stiles’ chest and stomach with a grunt, and then collapsing, his forehead resting against Stiles’ cheek.

Stiles is exhausted, still or again or just eternally, and he’s vaguely aware of Derek dragging his butt out of the bed and getting a washcloth, but he’s half asleep before Derek even gets back and cleans him off. He drifts off thinking about Derek’s smile after Stiles came in his mouth. He doesn’t want to make Derek spell out that this is a one time, we-all-almost-died kind of thing, so he’s not going to ask what this means. Still, he got to see that smile just this once, and Derek is letting him fall asleep with his nose buried in Derek‘s shoulder, and for now he feels pretty fucking lucky.

 

 


End file.
